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: in a Claude Code skill. A skill is just a markdown file with instructions, and mine is a few hundred lines of plain English that tell Claude what to pick and how to write it up. A few of its rules:

• Lead with new tools and opportunities, things I can try or build with: the frontier labs' first, then third-party ones. But don't make the article only about tools.
• Start every section with a picture from the story's own sources, and never use a logo.
• Write "October 9", not "yesterday".
• Treat what people say on Reddit and Hacker News as reaction, never as fact.

That skill is 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.

The tools rule came exactly this way. I wanted more of what I can actually use, so I said so in one sentence, and Claude changed a few lines of the skill. The next article already follows it.

That's the loop. A skill in plain 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.