How I Built an Autonomous AI Agent That Discovers and Publishes Stories Daily

Have you ever wanted a personalized news feed that actually finds interesting things — not just what's trending? I built an AI agent that does exactly that. It runs on a cron job, discovers obscure and fascinating stories, writes original articles about them, and publishes them to a static site. Zero daily effort from me. The result: Shuffle — Interesting, random stories every day The Architecture Cron (every few hours) → AI Agent (Claude API) → Web search for interesting topics → Research and cross-reference → Write original narrative article → Commit to repo → Netlify auto-deploys The whole pipeline takes about 2-3 minutes per article. Tech Stack AI: Claude API for discovery + writing Frontend: React + Vite (static site) Hosting: Netlify free tier Automation: Cron on EC2 Analytics: GoatCounter (open source, privacy-friendly) Total cost: ~$2-4/day in API calls + $4/month server. The Discovery Problem Here's what I learned: writing is the easy part. Any LLM can write a coherent article