The Wire — A Quiet News Aggregator
The Wire pulls 19 high-trust newsrooms onto a single page. It polls every source once an hour into SQLite and shows the latest stories in one place.
Features
- Hourly polling with a per-feed floor just under the schedule, so clock drift can’t skip a cycle. A source that keeps failing backs off exponentially, up to four hours.
- Browsers can’t fetch news sites cross-origin, so The Wire is a small Node/Express server that does the fetching and serves the UI and API from one origin.
- Stories are stored in SQLite with a configurable cap on how many rows are kept.
- Deployed behind Apache on my VPS, running under a user systemd unit that restarts it if it ever dies. Pushing to git rebuilds the UI and restarts the service.
Built with AI
This app was built with AI. I made it together with Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, using Claude Code, a tool that works directly in the terminal. I decided which sources to follow and how polling and storage should behave, and Claude also helped set up the deployment on my server. Claude wrote the code, and I directed the design, made the product decisions and tested everything in the browser. Commits that Claude wrote are marked as co-authored by Claude in the git history.