Overview
Staying current in UX design is an ongoing challenge as our tools, methods and strategies evolve daily. The subreddit r/UXDesign is a place where working designers actually share candidly, openly and honestly. Portfolio reviews, salary negotiation, layoffs, project rescues and the love-hate relationship with AI. The signal is high. But, it's A LOT.
This isn't just my problem. Reddit users across the site describe the same pattern in their own words: too much content, endless scroll, weak feed control and FOMO. I wanted to keep the strong signal and drop the high effort.
So I created a weekday digest that lands in my inbox each weekday morning at 7 a.m. Top posts from r/UXDesign over the previous 24 hours arrive as a single email, summarized by Claude, using my writing style guide, formatted for the constraints of the inbox. No app to open. No doomscroll. The whole intake takes about three minutes. If an important topic grabs my attention, it's one click to dive into the full thread.
The digest is a working artifact, not a mockup. It ships every weekday and I refine it regularly. It shows how I use AI as part of the work itself: structured, constrained and refined through my own standards.
My contribution
User Research / Workflow Design / Prompt Engineering / Email Design / Script Development
The team
Me, Myself and I
Process
The problem in Reddit users' own words
I checked my own frustration against what other Reddit users say. Posts in r/NewToReddit titled "How do you manage information overload on Reddit?" and "Absolutely lost" both use the phrase information overload. We all seem to have the same exhaustion from helpful threads buried under thousands of replies, arguments and side conversations.
The weekday digest was my response to that problem. It's built for one subreddit, but points to a much larger opportunity.
Right-sized tooling decisions
I chose email over file output because email is where my morning attention already lives. I chose weekday-only because… weekend! Each decision was the simplest tool that would actually work and only added complexity when it earned its place.
Designing around API constraints
Reddit shut down anonymous API access and closed self-service app registration months before I started this project. New applications were being denied immediately with no path forward for personal projects. Rather than give up before starting, I used publicly accessible Reddit content without storing credentials or requiring a registered app. The same method the official Reddit app uses to let you browse without logging in. The digest borrows that same approach to read public posts quietly, without a registered account or password. It worked on day one and continues today.
A design system for the inbox
Email is a meaningfully harder design surface than a product UI. System fonts only. No flexbox in older clients. No hover states. No JavaScript. The digest's typographic system bent to those constraints without breaking. The post-title hierarchy, the source link treatment, the section breaks. All of them work within the limits older mail clients impose.
AI constrained by my writing and editorial standards
Claude does the synthesis. The engine does the Reddit API calls, retry logic, styling and email delivery. The voice on top isn't Claude's. It's mine, filtered through a writing style guide I built. Voice profile, Associated Press-style rules and a library of my own writing samples load into Claude's context every morning before it touches a single Reddit post. The AI is one tool in a pipeline I wrote, not the headline.
A working artifact, not a mockup
It runs on my machine. It lands in my inbox at 7 a.m. each weekday. I refine the prompt and the style guide as the output reveals itself. Live, real-world artifacts always read as more credible than concepts.
Outcome
With the architecture solid, expansion was the real test. Two new digests added at one time: r/ClaudeAI on weekday mornings, r/KylieMinogue every Friday morning. Each one was just a new row in a config file.
These digests are the way I now keep up with the UX Design, Claude AI and, yes, Kylie Minogue communities. I trust the summarization because I wrote the prompts and the style guide that produces it.
The next phase I have planned is a public GitHub release proving the workflow is portable, not just personal. The biggest challenge with that is making sure it stays compliant with the Reddit Terms of Service. To be continued…