Tech watch with AI: a concrete workflow and honest limitations

I had 47 RSS feeds. Yes, 47. Plus three daily newsletters, GitHub Trending bookmarked, and a half-open Twitter/X tab "just to follow a few devs". The result: two hours per week scrolling, a vague sense of being up to date, and discovering in production a breaking change in a Go lib that I should have caught six weeks earlier. I changed my approach. Not because AI is magic — it isn't — but because the problem wasn't the volume of information. It was that I was reading without synthesizing, consuming without retaining. I restructured my tech watch around that observation, and AI became a tool in the process, not the core of it. The problem with traditional tech watch GitHub Trending is useful for discovering interesting projects on a Friday evening. It's a terrible source for tracking an ecosystem's evolution. What surfaces there is whatever got a lot of stars that week — usually a well-marketed side project, a README generator with a slick demo, or an "awesome-something" resource list.