Replace Your Favorite Newsletter — Scheduled Tasks In Action

This block is a tour, not a build. The ProvenLabs journal writes itself: an agent researches on a schedule, drafts an article, generates the cover art, narrates it for the podcast feed, publishes to the site, and emails Will a daily newsletter-style report. Nobody presses a button in the normal case.

Three runs fire every day: one covers AI news, one reviews an AI tool, one reads what's trending on GitHub. Weekly and monthly wraps sit on top of those.

Each run is an agent with a written routine: where to look, what counts as a credible source, what to skip, and what done looks like.

The routine includes a quality bar and a source rubric, both written down. The agent checks its own draft against them before anything lands. A run that can't clear the bar publishes nothing and says why, and that counts as a normal outcome.

Every published story goes into a ledger. Before writing, the agent checks it, and a near-duplicate of something already covered gets dropped before a word is drafted.

The rule that makes unattended publishing safe: the agent can request publication, and server-side gates can veto it. Failed validation, a missing cover image, a broken feed: no publish. The agent never gets the last word on its own work.

Articles are markdown files in version control, and those files are the source of truth. The database is a disposable copy the website reads from. Every article is a commit, so history, diff, and revert come free, and losing the database costs a replay rather than the content.

The destinations: the public journal, a podcast feed, and the daily report in Will's inbox. After the demo, open the journal's recent posts and see whether you can tell nobody wrote them by hand.

The whole engine is written up as a self-serve build guide: twenty-one parts from an empty repository to a running pipeline, every file included in full.

• The ProvenLabs journal
• The build guide