The pitch is easy: point a script at an RSS feed, have Claude read each item and decide whether it's worth your attention, and get a short digest in Telegram instead of scrolling. You've probably seen a dozen versions of this. There's a prompt floating around that generates most of it for you in one shot.
So I built it. The happy path took about an afternoon: fetch the Hacker News front page, score each item against a plain-language description of what I care about, dedupe against what I've already seen, send a Telegram message. Thirty items in, a handful out, each with a one-line reason it made the cut.
Then I ran it against real data, and it broke three times. Not in dramatic ways. In quiet ways, the kind that pass every test you write in the first hour and then fail the first time reality hands you input you didn't imagine. This post is about those three, because they're the difference between "I got it working on my machine" and "it runs every morning and I trust it."
Here's what a run looks like when it's behaving:
1. Show HN: Open-source engine running Gemma 4 26B in 2 GB RAM on any M-series Mac
