Every news app I tried eventually revealed the same thing: my reading habits were the product. Which articles I opened, how long I stayed, when I scrolled away — all of it was logged, sent somewhere, and folded into an ad profile. I'd open an app to learn what was happening in the world and leave feeling surveilled instead of informed.
I wanted something boring. A plain text file waiting in my home directory at 7am. No push notifications. No infinite scroll. No algorithm quietly deciding what I should care about. Just the top stories from sources I actually trust, summarized plainly, and then done. When I realized a local LLM and a few API calls could do exactly that overnight on my own machine, it felt almost too simple not to build.
Daily Pulse is the opposite of an app. There's no server watching which stories you open. No engagement metric optimizing for your attention. It runs, it writes a file, it exits. What you do with the brief is entirely your own.