The Optimist

In a world full of bad news, The Optimist is your curated feed for the good stuff — stories and updates about the things you actually care about.

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🌟 Inspiration

With wars, climate change, and endless negativity flooding our feeds, it's no wonder people feel anxious and overwhelmed. But here's the thing good things are happening every single day!! So we built The Optimist: a personalized, curated feed of uplifting and positive news from around the world, filtered specifically around the topics you care about most! The world isn’t all bad 🌍✨

🛠️ How we built it

We brought The Optimist to life using React + Tailwind CSS for a sleek frontend, Supabase for the backend, and the power of Claude AI to surface the good news. Our custom-built Claude pipeline starts out by calling News API to find articles relevant to the user’s interests, then performs sentiment analysis to surface only the most positive stories.

💪 Challenges we ran into

Defining "good news" is trickier than it sounds, since positivity is deeply subjective! We tackled this by leveraging Claude's sentiment analysis to intelligently evaluate and filter articles. Furthermore, it was challenging to determine how we wanted to efficiently use the News API to generate the best subset of relevant articles. We had to ensure that we were getting a comprehensive set of stories, while at the same time not overwhelming Claude with too much data to parse.

🏆 Accomplishments we're proud of

Since it was our first time building with AI, we're proud that we were able to ship a working agent in such a short time, and connect it to our frontend to create a fun, user-friendly product experience.

🧠 What we learned

AI agents are powerful, but certainly offer many new types of challenges. Starting from scratch, we learned to build agent pipelines while integrating several tools. Not only that, teaching a model to understand something as nuanced as human optimism is no small feat. However, the learning experience was highly rewarding, and the final result made it all worth it.

🚀 What's next for The Optimist

  • “Tell me more about this article” - a chat feature to allow you to ask questions and learn more about a particular article
  • Improving the sentiment analysis algorithm
  • Mobile app support
  • Daily/weekly digest emails with your personalised good news roundup
  • Social sharing so you can spread the good news

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