AlphaSight

AlphaSight · The Brief is a Burmese-language daily news publication with no newsroom. Every day it researches the live web, writes each desk’s article, and publishes it on that desk’s own schedule — then reads across the day’s editions and writes the front-page analysis itself.

The seven desks

Time (MMT)	Desk
07:30	⚽ Sports
09:00	📬 The Brief — the signed daily newsletter
09:00	💼 Business & Markets
11:30	📰 Daily News — the full digest
13:30	💻 Tech & AI
15:00	🏥 Health & Medicine
17:15	🌏 Geopolitics & Defense

How a day runs

Nobody has to do anything. Cron asks a question every five minutes — for each enabled series, is the Myanmar clock past its publish time with nothing published today? — and if the answer is yes, that article gets written and published. Once the day’s editions are in, the analysis writes itself and the front page updates.

Because the schedule is a question rather than a timer, it is editable from a browser and a missed slot heals itself on the next tick.

Run it from a browser

The admin panel is the whole control surface — no terminal, no deploy:

• Dashboard — every series at a glance: publish time, whether it went out today, how many sources it’s using
• Run now — publish off-schedule at any hour; safe to press twice, and it works even on a paused series
• Force re-run — rewrite and replace today’s article; it asks first, because it overwrites published work
• Prompt editing — the full instruction Claude receives, with a preview box showing the exact final text including the automatically appended source rules
• Publish time and enable/disable — in Myanmar time, taking effect on the next check

Generation takes two to six minutes, and two runs of the same series can never overlap.

Sources that actually steer the research

Each series carries its own source list, in one of two modes — prefer biases research toward a site at no cost, crawl requires Claude to fetch that exact URL before writing.

This matters more than it sounds. Before sources were configured, one day’s digest cited fifteen links, only one from a credible major outlet — and not a single Myanmar source, despite Myanmar being its first desk. With sources configured, the same digest cited Irrawaddy, DVB and BNI.

Sources are scoped on purpose: the digest has desks for tech, sport, markets and weather and carries sources for those; the geopolitics column would only be worse for having football sites in its list.

Beyond the page

• Vertical video — any article or the daily analysis renders to a portrait MP4, split into cards
• Mobile app — Android and iOS, running on the public read API, with a push notification the moment an article publishes
• Self-documenting — the site serves its own user and developer guides at /docs

Tech

Node + Express with SQLite (WAL) as the single source of truth — schedule, prompts, series metadata and sources all live in the database, not in files, which is what lets the admin panel change behaviour without a deploy. Articles are written by the Claude CLI researching the live web. Generation publishes over HTTP to the app rather than writing the database directly, so one writer means no lock contention. Video is Chromium → PNG → ffmpeg; the mobile app is Expo, notified through Expo push. Served behind nginx on a VPS.