A validated Reddit user pain point

Out of curiosity I checked whether the frustration was mine alone. It isn't. Across Reddit, users describe the same experience in the same words: information overload, good discussions buried in noise, feeds that reward scrolling over understanding.

What the AI actually does

It ranks. The digest surfaces the top posts from the previous 24 hours, so the decision about what deserves attention is already made.

It synthesizes. The digest distills what the community actually said, disagreements included.

It summarizes to a time limit. The whole read is three minutes. Length discipline is enforced.

It writes in my voice. The rules-based style guide includes voice principles, Associated Press style rules and my own writing samples. The model does the labor; the standards are mine.

The product is also very much what I didn't build

In hindsight, the best decisions came down to subtraction. No app, because my morning attention already lives in my Inbox. The digest reads only public posts through Reddit's official app authentication with no personal account attached. This restraint was a product decision too. Designing for email means using system fonts only, no modern layout, no hover states, no scripting. The digest's hierarchy is carried entirely by typography and spacing that survive in any email client.

One admin interface to rule them all

More subreddits meant more configurations to hand-edit. So I built an admin interface. Tasks like adding a new digest, pausing one temporarily or retuning a schedule can all be completed from a web browser. The workflow that used to live in a text file now lives in a dashboard.