You can literally build an AI agent that scours the internet for you and delivers a perfect, personalized news digest to your inbox every morning.
I just stumbled upon this incredible tutorial, and it’s one of the most practical AI automation guides I’ve seen in a while. This talented creator walks through the entire process of building a custom news-gathering agent using a powerful open-source tool. The best part is that it’s completely customizable to any topic, no matter how niche.
🤖 The Core Tool: N8N
The magic behind this project is a tool called N8N (pronounced “n-eight-n”). Think of it as a supercharged, open-source version of Zapier or Make that you can host yourself. The expert explains that you can run it for free on your own computer, but the real power comes from setting it up on an always-on cloud server so your automations can run 24/7 without you lifting a finger.
Here’s the high-level breakdown of how the person who shared it built the workflow.
📌 Collect Your Sources. The agent starts by grabbing a list of RSS feeds you provide. The creator shows how to find these feeds for your favorite sites and list them out. The agent then reads every article from these feeds, collecting snippets of text from each one.
✅ Let AI Do the Heavy Lifting. Next, all those raw news snippets are bundled together and fed to an AI model like GPT-4. Using a simple but effective prompt, the author instructs the AI to act as a news aggregator, summarize only the past 24 hours of news, and rewrite it in plain, easy-to-understand English.
💡 Format and Deliver. The final step is pure automation magic! The agent takes the AI’s summarized text, converts it from a plain format (Markdown) into a nicely formatted email (HTML), and sends it directly to your inbox. This whole process is set on a schedule to run automatically every single morning.
📝 Prompt of the Day
This innovator shared the exact system prompt used to get the AI to summarize the news. It’s a great example of giving the AI a clear role and instructions:
only grab the news from the past 24 hours. act as a tech news aggregator and write in plain easy to understand English with no tech jargon. Here is the list of news.
This is just scratching the surface of what this tool can do, but it’s an awesome starting point. I was blown away by how straightforward the process was once it was broken down into steps.
For the full step-by-step video walkthrough, including how to set up the server and connect all the nodes, check out the original post.