The Brief

BRIEF is a mobile first news app that publishes one curated daily edition at 4 AM EST. One top story, four supporting articles. No infinite scroll. Read, finish, move on.

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Inspiration

Modern news products overwhelm users with infinite feeds, constant refreshes, and engagement-driven noise. I wanted to explore what a news app would look like if it behaved like a daily newspaper instead of a social platform. The goal was to respect attention, reduce cognitive load, and still deliver reporting people already expect to hear about from trusted outlets.

BRIEF was inspired by one core constraint: publish once per day. One edition. A clear beginning and end.

What it does

BRIEF is a mobile-first news app that publishes a single curated daily edition at 4 AM EST.
Each edition contains exactly:

  • One Top Today story
  • Four supporting articles across key categories

Users read a complete edition, mark articles as read, and move on. There is no infinite scrolling, no constant refresh, and no engagement manipulation. Every article includes full content, imagery, source attribution, and direct links to the original publishers.

How I built it

The frontend is built with React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS, designed to feel like a compact digital newspaper optimized for mobile reading. Articles open into a slide-up reading view with clear typography, minimal distraction, and persistent read-state tracking.

The backend runs on a scheduled daily workflow. At exactly 4 AM EST, a job fetches articles from NewsAPI and uses the Gemini API as an editorial layer to evaluate relevance, popularity, and significance. The final curated edition is stored and exposed through a read-only endpoint.

The frontend never scrapes data or calls AI models. It only consumes the pre-generated daily edition, ensuring fast load times and secure API usage.

What I learned

Hard constraints simplify both product and architecture. Limiting updates to once per day reduced system complexity, improved performance, and created a calmer user experience. I also learned that AI works best as an editor and filter, not as a generator of infinite content.

Challenges

Key challenges included:

  • Designing a UI that felt modern without being distracting
  • Preventing unnecessary refreshes and repeated API calls
  • Ensuring every article had real content, images, and valid sources
  • Coordinating scheduling, caching, and client-side fallbacks cleanly

Built with

  • React
  • TypeScript
  • Tailwind CSS
  • Node.js
  • GitHub Actions
  • NewsAPI
  • Gemini 3 API

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