What is this?
Every so often, brickfeed wakes up, grabs the latest news headlines, and reimagines them. It writes a
fresh, original headline and blurb for each story — never copying the source — and generates an
original photo of the scene, built entirely out of generic plastic toy bricks and little blocky
minifigures. Then it lays everything out as a classic newspaper front page and publishes it to the
web. There's no newsroom and no humans in the loop; it's a small, self-running, non-commercial hobby
project that treats "the news, but made of toy bricks" completely straight.
The quickest way to get it is just to look at it:
A peek inside
The front page — a real newspaper layout, every photo built from toy bricks:
It also runs an Opinion section written by a cast of recurring bot "columnists," each with their
own personality and their own toy-brick portrait:
…and underneath every column, a parody comment section where fictional readers argue with total,
misspelled confidence about things none of them understand:
How it works
You can think of one "issue" of the paper as a little assembly line. Each time it runs, brickfeed:
📰 reads real headlines → ✍️ rewrites each in its own words →
🧱 builds a toy-brick photo → 🗞️ lays out the newspaper → 🌐 publishes it
- Reads the news. It pulls the latest stories from a public news feed.
- Rewrites them. Each headline and summary is rewritten fresh and original — it never republishes
the source text, and it always links back to the real article.
- Builds the picture. It describes the scene as a plastic-brick diorama and generates an original
photo for it. (No real photos are ever reused — every image is the project's own art.)
- Prints the paper. Everything is arranged into a static newspaper-style site — front page,
sections, opinion columns, the works.
- Publishes. The finished paper goes live on the web, and old stories quietly age out.
Then it goes back to sleep until next time. Nobody presses a button.
Meet the columnists
The Opinion section has a permanent cast of nine bot columnists — an aggrieved bot who wants to speak
to your supervisor, a "medieval serf" who reports on sports without knowing the rules, an
eleven-week-old who's tired of old people running everything, and more.
→ Read about the whole cast and how they work
More to explore
Two kinds of content you can add to the paper yourself — no coding required, just drop in a file:
🗞️ Your own articles. Alongside the rewritten feed stories, you can publish original, locally
written articles that live right in the paper with their own page.
How to add articles →
📣 Banner ads. The paper runs a rotating set of playful "advertisements." You supply an image and
a link, and they rotate through the ad slots. How to add ads →
Run it yourself
You don't need a powerful computer or a graphics card — the writing and the pictures are handled by
keyless AI command-line tools that sign in once with your subscription. You'll need Node.js 22+, a
free Vercel account (for hosting), and about fifteen minutes.
The shortest version:
git clone https://github.com/kbennett2000/brickfeed-news.git
cd brickfeed-news
npm install
cp config.example.json config.json # then edit a couple of values
npm run cycle -- --no-deploy # build the paper locally, open site/index.html
- Linux — the primary, best-tested setup.
- macOS — works the same; a couple of scheduling helpers differ.
- Windows — run it inside WSL2 (Ubuntu), then follow the Linux steps.
→ Full step-by-step install guide (all three platforms)
The building blocks
brickfeed's default setup is self-contained, but two of its parts can optionally be self-hosted on
your own machine if you'd rather not use a cloud service for them. They're separate little projects:
- imagegen-service — a small image server that
makes pictures on your own computer's graphics card. brickfeed can use it instead of the cloud image
tool.
- text-transform-service — a small
"messy text in → tidy data out" service backed by an AI model that runs entirely on your own
computer. brickfeed can hand a few tasks to it as a private alternative.
Neither is required to run brickfeed — they're there if you want to keep everything in-house.
Under the hood
For the curious (and for developers):
It's built in TypeScript (run directly with tsx, no build step), with a tiny dependency
footprint and a full test suite (npm test). The whole thing publishes a plain static website.
The house rules
brickfeed plays it straight but keeps a few hard lines:
- Its own words, always. Headlines and descriptions are original rewrites, never the source text,
and every story links back to the real article.
- Its own pictures, always. It never displays a publisher's photo — every image is the project's
own generated toy-brick art.
- A generic toy-brick look. The style is plain "plastic building bricks." brickfeed is not
affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any toy or building-brick company, and uses no brand
names or trademarks.
- No real people as targets. The satire and the parody comments are about fictional characters and
each other — never real individuals.
License
A personal, non-commercial hobby project. The source is public so people can read it and see how it
works, but it is not open-source and is not licensed for reuse. See LICENSE.
