I don't need someone else's news algorithm anymore

Every news feed I read has an algorithm, and none of them are mine. The platform decides what's hot, what's buried, and what I never see. I can like and unfollow, but I can't open the rule book. It's tuned for someone's business, not for my morning.

Two weeks ago I started building my own. It's news.lyabah.com, a daily AI article in English and Ukrainian.

The plumbing is boring on purpose. A small Go service watches about sixty sources: lab blogs, changelogs, YouTube channels, Hacker News searches. Each one is just a URL and a DOM path. Every morning Claude Code asks the service what changed, sends a researcher agent to read each change, sends a scout to look beyond my list, checks what Reddit and Hacker News are arguing about, and writes the article. It can even add up to two new sources a run, so the list grows by itself.

The interesting part is where the algorithm lives. It's a markdown file. A few hundred lines of plain English: the frontier labs first, but not only them. A picture over every section, never a logo. Say "October 9", not "yesterday". Discussion is reaction, never fact.

That's the whole ranking system. I can read it in ten minutes. And when I disagree with it, I change a sentence.

Which means I need to know when I disagree. So every article ships with a small "How the stories were picked" section. It accounts for every link the agents brought back: what made the article, what only made the long version, what got left out and why. I read it like a code review. "Left out: a recap of launches weeks old" — fair. "Left out: paywalled" — fine. A story I cared about squeezed into one line in brief — that's a new rule.

Today's rule, for example: new tools and opportunities first. Something I can actually try beats news of similar weight, the big labs' tools before third-party ones. But not only tools, or I'd be reading a product catalogue.

That's the loop. Rules in English, a daily run, a written explanation, and me arguing with it. The feed gets a little closer to what I want every week, and it never quietly changes behind my back to keep me scrolling.

I'm not saying everyone should run a fleet of agents to read the news. But we don't have to take the feed we're given anymore. The algorithm can be ours, and it can be a file we read.