The Reader Is the AI
A developer I've read for years shipped something this week: a modern, AI-native RSS reader. It's genuinely nice — a couple hundred curated sources, eighteen thousand articles, a clever in-app assistant that reads the article you're looking at and answers questions about it. Keyboard shortcuts, the works. A real product, built over months on top of Claude Code and Codex, with a backend, an account system, a sync layer, the lot. I'd built the same thing months ago. Except mine isn't an app. Mine is a 640-line Python script that writes a Markdown file, plus a prompt that turns my AI assistant into the reader. No backend. No database. No account. No UI. And sitting here comparing the two, I don't think I cut corners. I think I found the floor — the actual minimum the problem requires once you stop assuming the answer has to be an application. That gap is worth pulling apart, because it's not really about RSS. It's about a whole category of software that...