Research Assistant

An AI-powered research assistant that runs while you sleep. It fetches RSS feeds, filters for relevance to your current work, and writes a personalized digest to your repo every morning.

How It Works

5:00 AM → Fetch RSS feeds → Filter with Claude Haiku → Analyze with Claude Sonnet → Write digest → Commit

1. Fetches articles from RSS feeds you configure
2. Reads your drafts and IDEAS.md to understand your current focus
3. Filters articles for relevance (batch processing with Claude Haiku)
4. Analyzes relevant articles in depth (Claude Sonnet)
5. Synthesizes themes across articles
6. Writes a personalized digest to knowledge/feeds/YYYY-MM-DD.md
7. Commits and pushes automatically

Quick Start

1. Fork this repo

Click "Use this template" or fork it.

2. Add your Anthropic API key

Go to Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions → New repository secret

• Name: ANTHROPIC_API_KEY
• Value: Your API key from console.anthropic.com

3. Enable workflow permissions

Go to Settings → Actions → General → Workflow permissions

Select "Read and write permissions"

4. Configure your feeds

Edit config/feeds.yaml:

feeds:
  - name: Simon Willison
    url: https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/

  - name: Hacker News
    url: https://hnrss.org/frontpage

  # Add your favorite blogs and news sources

5. Add your context

Edit IDEAS.md with your current interests, projects, and goals. The assistant uses this to determine what's relevant to you.

Add drafts to content/drafts/ - these are also used for context.

6. Run it

Go to Actions → Research Assistant → Run workflow

Or wait until 5am Berlin time (4am UTC) for the scheduled run.

Output

Digests appear in knowledge/feeds/:

# Research Digest: January 19, 2026

## Themes Today
- Three authors discussed agentic AI workflows
- Growing interest in local-first approaches

## Articles

### Simon Willison: "Building with Claude"
**Summary:** Explores patterns for building reliable AI applications...
**Key insight:** Context window management matters more than prompt engineering
**Relevance:** High - directly relates to your draft on AI workflows
**Tags:** #ai #engineering

Configuration

Schedule

Default: 5am Berlin time (4am UTC). Edit .github/workflows/research-assistant.yml:

schedule:
  - cron: '0 4 * * *'  # Change this to your preferred time

Model Selection

The assistant uses:

• Claude Haiku for filtering (fast, cheap)
• Claude Sonnet for analysis (thorough, nuanced)

Edit scripts/research_assistant/filter.py and analyze.py to change models.

Cost

Estimated cost: ~$0.50/day with typical usage (50 feeds, ~30 relevant articles).

• Haiku filtering: ~$0.02
• Sonnet analysis: ~$0.45
• Synthesis: ~$0.02

The Origin Story

This tool was built in a single collaborative session between a human and Claude. Read the full conversation: docs/how-it-was-built.md

License

MIT - See LICENSE file