paperboy

Old paperboys delivered one newspaper to one house. This one reads ten thousand things and delivers the twelve that matter to you.

📬 Hosted Service: Looking for a daily or weekly filtered digest delivered directly to your email without running local bots or LLMs? Sign up for Paperboy at newpaperboy.com →

A daily Discord digest of news + research papers, scored by your local LLM against your own interests. The self-hosted edition needs no Paperboy cloud account or hosted subscription.

Drop your favorite RSS feeds in news_sources.yaml. Describe your stack in research-interests.md. Wake up to a Discord post like this:

🌅 morning prompts — today's queue:

📄 papers
• Diff-Transformer — applies to my-agent. Take?
• Self-Critique-via-Rubric vs. constitutional AI — applies to my-rag. Take?

📰 news
• Anthropic shipped tool-streaming. What changes for orchestrator+worker stacks?
• OpenAI's new pricing tier kills the gap for self-hosted Whisper. Hot take?

❓ answer
• How do you choose between Q3_K_M and Q4_K_M quantization for a 24GB GPU?

🎯 today
• Revive or kill: weekend-experiment (dead 17d) — pick one before EOD.

The bot also posts a separate Research Digest message with the top 3 papers scored ≥ 7/10 against your stack, each with a one-line "how WE'd apply it" note from your local LLM.

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Daily Intelligence Brief product sample

The hosted product direction is the Paperboy Daily Intelligence Brief: one ranked morning edition assembled from explicitly forwarded newsletters, public news/research/data, and optional selected GitHub repositories. Repo Radar is a section of that edition, not a separate product. Suggested actions remain inert text for human review.

The public founding beta is at newpaperboy.com. The original paperboy.kaibuilds.com host remains available for existing links and callbacks. Its live automatic intake is currently narrower than that product direction: it previews and saves user-selected public RSS/Atom feeds, verifies the delivery email, and activates scheduled delivery only after hosted checkout confirms a trial. The page reports checkout availability live; a preview or verified email is not a paid subscription.

This repository includes a deterministic, local-only sample of the selection and email-rendering boundary. It makes no network calls, sends no email, and uses sanitized fixture inputs. Relevance thresholds, edition size, and per-source diversity are explicit configuration so plan limits can change without changing ranking logic.

python -m paperboy.daily_brief.cli \
  --input examples/daily-brief.sample.json \
  --out-dir .local/daily-brief

The command writes plain-text and HTML previews. Run it with examples/daily-brief.quiet.json to see the one-line quiet edition used when nothing clears the relevance bar; it never pads the brief with weak items.

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News → Agent Action Queue

A file-first bridge that promotes the highest-signal digest items (papers scored ≥ 7 or flagged should_prototype, plus the top-weighted prompts) into a reviewable queue of agent tasks — each with a concrete suggested_action.

It writes an append-only JSONL queue and a rendered Markdown view, and sends nothing (no Discord, no webhook). The queue is a human review gate: an agent acts only on items you've marked approved.

python -m paperboy.digest.action_queue          # write queue (JSONL + Markdown)
python -m paperboy.digest.action_queue --dry-run # preview only

If events.db is empty/absent, it falls back to a bundled public fixture so it always produces output.

• Module: paperboy/digest/action_queue.py
• Demo output: examples/action-queue.demo.jsonl · examples/action-queue.demo.md
• Dashboard: dashboard/action-queue.html (open directly in a browser)
• Walkthrough: docs/action-queue.md

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What this gives you

Seven cron jobs that work together:

1. research-ingest — pulls new papers daily from arXiv + HF Daily Papers
   • Semantic Scholar.
2. research-score — local LLM rates each paper 0-10 for whether it could improve one of YOUR systems (grounded by research-interests.md).
3. news-opinion — fetches RSS feeds grouped by vertical, drafts a sharp hot-take prompt per item via local LLM.
4. papers-to-prompts — promotes top-scored papers into the morning queue.
5. topical-questions — picks AEO-shaped questions from YOUR pillar map.
6. today-briefing — parses a daily-brief markdown file (optional) for carry-overs and "dead repo" callouts.
7. prompt-digest — assembles + posts the morning digest to Discord.
8. research-digest — posts the top-3 newly-scored papers separately.

All of them write to one SQLite events.db. Everything is dedup'd by content hash, so re-runs are idempotent.

What you need

• A Linux box with systemd (any small VPS or homelab machine works)
• Ollama running locally with one fast model (e.g. llama3.2:3b) and one stronger model (e.g. qwen2.5:7b)
• A Discord webhook (or a bot token + channel ID)
• Python 3.10+

That's it. No Postgres, no Redis, no Docker, no cloud accounts.

Install

git clone https://github.com/cgallic/paperboy.git
cd paperboy
sudo ./scripts/bootstrap.sh

Then:

1. Edit /etc/paperboy/paperboy.env — set DISCORD_WEBHOOK.
2. Edit /etc/paperboy/news_sources.yaml — your RSS feeds, by topic.
3. Edit /etc/paperboy/research-interests.md — describe YOUR systems. This is the most important file — without it, the scorer can't tell what matters to you.
4. (Optional) Edit /etc/paperboy/topical-map.md — your content pillars.

Test:

sudo systemctl start paperboy-news-opinion.service
journalctl -u paperboy-news-opinion.service -n 50

See docs/INSTALL.md for the full walkthrough.

Architecture (one diagram)

            morning UTC                       

10:00 │ research-ingest  ──► events.db (paper events)
10:45 │ research-score   ──► events.db (paper-score events, via local Ollama)
11:00 │ news-opinion     ──► events.db (pattern-scan/question, stream=news)
11:05 │ papers-to-prompts ──► events.db (stream=papers)
11:08 │ topical-questions ──► events.db (stream=answer)
11:10 │ today-briefing   ──► events.db (stream=today)
11:15 │ prompt-digest    ──► Discord  (the morning post)
12:00 │ research-digest  ──► Discord  (separate top-3 paper post)

One SQLite table. Twelve env vars. Zero queues, zero brokers.

See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for the full data model and event schema.

Customizing

Most of the value comes from tuning the config files, not the code. See docs/personalizing.md for:

• Adding/removing news verticals
• Writing a good research-interests.md (the scorer's grounding)
• Building your own topical map
• Optional: enabling LLM reframing of prompts into audience-targeted hooks

Relationship to open-brane

paperboy is a consumer of an event-log architecture defined by cgallic/open-brane — "an event-log brain for people who keep losing context." open-brane owns the events.db schema, the canonical write path (record_event.py), an MCP server, and adapters for gdrive / Claude sessions / git history. It also ships embed_events.py + semantic_search.py for vector queries.

paperboy adds the news + research-paper domain on top: RSS scanners, arXiv + HF + Semantic Scholar ingest, local-LLM scoring against your stack, and the morning Discord digest.

paperboy can run standalone — it ships a compatible schema in its own db.py so you don't need open-brane to get the digest working. But if you install open-brane alongside (or first), every other ingester populates the same store and paperboy's digest gets richer for free.

Roadmap

See docs/ROADMAP.md. The full planned stack:

1. open-brane — events.db foundation + MCP + canonical adapters (already shipped)
2. paperboy (this repo) — news + papers + Discord digest
3. More open-brane adapters — gmail, chatgpt, audible, linkedin, etc. (PRs to open-brane or sibling repos)
4. Markdown KG / wiki compiler — typed wiki pages + NL query CLI (planned, name TBD)
5. cgallic/pendant-android + cgallic/pendant-pipeline — custom Omi-pendant app + agent-side audio pipeline (planned)
6. cgallic/casa-a2a — JSON-RPC 2.0 broker + skill-sidecar pattern for cross-host agent coordination (planned)

Hosted Edition

If you prefer a zero-maintenance morning digest delivered to your email rather than self-hosting the bot:

• Filter the noise: Choose from Hacker News, arXiv AI, GitHub releases, or your own RSS feeds.
• Custom relevance: Define exactly what matches your stack and what topics to ignore.
• Inbox delivery: Receive clean daily or weekly email briefs with direct source links and relevance scores.

👉 Create your personal rollup at newpaperboy.com

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

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Built and maintained by Connor Gallic — connect on LinkedIn.