Briefings: Your Personal Executive Briefing
The engine behind my AI newsletter, now open source.
About a year ago, I started heavily investing in using AI to help me be more productive. One of the first things I did was put AI to work on the thing it’s genuinely good at: summarizing content.
Since AI was moving fast, I wondered if I could get AI to summarize AI.
The experiment worked. What started as a personal tool eventually became “Briefs,” a section of my newsletter. For the last 10 months, I’ve had a service that read through thousands of articles a week, summarizing and distilling them into a single weekly post.
I constantly honed the prompts to make the output feel more human and sharp — less AI slop, more Puck. It took a lot of iteration to get there.
Today I’m sun-setting Briefs to make room for other content on Frank’s Takeaways. But I’ve refactored the code and I’m open sourcing it as Briefings for anyone to use.
What It Does
Briefings is an automated RSS summarization system. It fetches articles from your configured feeds, generates daily AI summaries, and compiles weekly digest newsletters. You can optionally hook up email delivery to send the digests automatically.
Use Cases
Some ideas for what you can do with this:
Substack digest. Aggregate multiple Substacks into one curated newsletter. I was doing this with AI-focused writers.
Industry monitoring. Track trade publications, company blogs, and regulatory feeds. Get a single weekly synthesis instead of 50 browser tabs.
Competitive intelligence. Monitor competitor announcements and news coverage. Weekly summaries surface strategic shifts you might miss.
Research tracker. Point it at arXiv, MIT Technology Review, or domain-specific feeds. Build a searchable archive of key developments.
Investment research. Track sector news and earnings coverage. Weekly synthesis for investment thesis development.
Personal knowledge base. Curate feeds around topics you care about. Daily summaries keep you current without the scroll.
How It Works
Every few hours, the system pulls new articles from your RSS feeds. Once a day, it summarizes them. Once a week, it takes all those daily summaries and synthesizes them into a digest — finding patterns, surfacing themes, connecting dots across the week’s content.
The layered approach matters: daily summaries are quick hits, weekly digests are where the real value emerges. The system also remembers previous digests, so it knows what you’ve already covered and can build on earlier themes rather than repeating itself.
I spent most of my time tuning the prompts to get the voice right. That’s the part you’ll want to customize for your own use.
For the Briefs Readers
For those looking for their AI roundup fix now that I’m stepping away, two options:
Read someone else’s. I recommend The Leverage. Evan Armstrong covers tech markets with rigor and actual voice. His Weekend Leverage email fills the same niche.
Write your own. That’s what Briefings is for. Pick your feeds, tune the prompts, and you’ve got a personalized digest that covers exactly what you care about. The repo is at hirefrank/briefings — you’ll be up and running in under 10 minutes.
The Briefs archive stays up at franktakeaways.com/s/briefs for reference.
If you build something with Briefings, I’d love to hear about it.