Morning Briefing Builder — replace ten doom-scroll tabs with one written page

Why this exists

Mornings are a feed-shaped trap. Twitter, LinkedIn, Hacker News, three newsletters, a stock app, a sports score. Every one of them is engineered to keep you scrolling. None of them give you a written paragraph that says: here is what you actually need to know today.

The closest thing is a paid newsletter. But every newsletter is general by design — written for thirty thousand readers, not for you specifically. I want a newsletter of one.

What it does

A short web app where you configure once:

• 5–10 interests in plain English ("Indian biotech regulatory news," "Premier League Tottenham updates," "AI startup funding rounds over $50M")
• Sources you trust (websites, RSS feeds, optional)
• Briefing length (300, 600, or 900 words)
• Delivery time (a button you press, or a cron-emailed brief)

Each morning the app calls Gemini with your config, runs grounded web search, and produces a written brief — paragraphs, not bullet points — with footnoted citations. You read it in five minutes. You skip the feeds entirely.

How it's built

• Frontend: Next.js, deployed static.
• Backend: a single API route that takes your config, calls Gemini API with grounding tools enabled, and returns the brief.
• Storage: Supabase or local file — your config persists, your past briefs are an archive you can search.
• Cost: Gemini's grounded-search calls are the only variable cost. Roughly $0.05 per brief at current pricing — manageable for personal use.

What it isn't

Not a public newsletter. Not a content-aggregation business. There's no shareable feed, no community, no "trending today."

The whole point is that it's yours. If two people use it, they get two different briefings. Sharing is anti-feature.

Why it doesn't exist yet

I built a prototype in March 2026 and shelved it. The brief was good but not worth replacing my morning routine for. The bar is high — beating the dopamine loop of Twitter requires the brief to be both faster and more useful.

I'm waiting for one of two things: (a) Gemini's grounding to get cheaper enough that I can run multiple briefs per day, or (b) the patience to actually write the prompt-engineering pass that makes the brief read like a person wrote it, not like an LLM regurgitating headlines.