An engineer’s side project is reshaping automated journalism by combining AI with trustworthy reporting methods. The Agentic Tribune represents an intriguing experiment in using AI to produce fact-based news at scale, addressing financial pressures on traditional media while maintaining journalistic integrity. This project offers a window into both the technical challenges of building AI content systems and their potential implications for the future of news production.
The big picture: A software engineer working in AI has created a fully automated news site that publishes original, fact-based reporting daily without human intervention.
- The Agentic Tribune produces approximately 22 articles on weekdays and 12 on weekends, each costing between $0.25-0.30 in API usage.
- The system focuses on neutral, factual reporting based on credible sources like government releases, legal rulings, and financial reports.
Behind the automation: The site runs on a seven-step AI pipeline that handles everything from finding news leads to publishing finished articles.
- The process includes scanning structured feeds for leads, scoring them based on metrics like recency and newsworthiness, conducting AI-powered research, and writing articles.
- Each article undergoes AI self-critique and revision before being formatted, tagged, and published automatically.
Technical challenges: Managing LLM behavior proved to be one of the most significant hurdles in building a reliable automated news system.
- The developer encountered issues with models misinterpreting scoring metrics, leaking details between tasks, hallucinating facts, and misrepresenting themselves as established news organizations.
- Simpler prompts often outperformed elaborate ones, and positive requirements worked better than negative restrictions.
The tech stack: The project combines straightforward web technologies with AI capabilities.
- The backend uses Flask, SQLite, cron jobs, and Python scripts with prompts generated from Jinja2 templates.
- The system is deployed on EC2 with Nginx and Gunicorn, using static HTML for the frontend and ChatGPT-generated icons.
Why this matters: The project demonstrates how AI might complement rather than replace human journalism, potentially freeing up resources for more complex reporting tasks.
- The developer acknowledges that AI news can only report on what’s already public, emphasizing there’s “no substitute for investigative reporters, war correspondents, or interviews.”
- Low-cost, trustworthy summaries of events could help redirect human journalistic talent toward reporting that requires human judgment and investigation.
Recent Stories
DOE fusion roadmap targets 2030s commercial deployment as AI drives $9B investment
The Department of Energy has released a new roadmap targeting commercial-scale fusion power deployment by the mid-2030s, though the plan lacks specific funding commitments and relies on scientific breakthroughs that have eluded researchers for decades. The strategy emphasizes public-private partnerships and positions AI as both a research tool and motivation for developing fusion energy to meet data centers' growing electricity demands. The big picture: The DOE's roadmap aims to "deliver the public infrastructure that supports the fusion private sector scale up in the 2030s," but acknowledges it cannot commit to specific funding levels and remains subject to Congressional appropriations. Why...
Oct 17, 2025Tying it all together: Credo’s purple cables power the $4B AI data center boom
Credo, a Silicon Valley semiconductor company specializing in data center cables and chips, has seen its stock price more than double this year to $143.61, following a 245% surge in 2024. The company's signature purple cables, which cost between $300-$500 each, have become essential infrastructure for AI data centers, positioning Credo to capitalize on the trillion-dollar AI infrastructure expansion as hyperscalers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Elon Musk's xAI rapidly build out massive computing facilities. What you should know: Credo's active electrical cables (AECs) are becoming indispensable for connecting the massive GPU clusters required for AI training and inference. The company...
Oct 17, 2025Vatican launches Latin American AI network for human development
The Vatican hosted a two-day conference bringing together 50 global experts to explore how artificial intelligence can advance peace, social justice, and human development. The event launched the Latin American AI Network for Integral Human Development and established principles for ethical AI governance that prioritize human dignity over technological advancement. What you should know: The Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, the Vatican's research body for social issues, organized the "Digital Rerum Novarum" conference on October 16-17, combining academic research with practical AI applications. Participants included leading experts from MIT, Microsoft, Columbia University, the UN, and major European institutions. The conference...