HACKER Q&A
📣 hikerell

How to build an AI to find info I care about online?


I want to build an AI agent that lets me define what information interests me, such as "the hottest design trend discussions on Reddit" or "who's looking for a remote designer collaboration." This AI agent would automatically browse various forums and news sites daily, dig up information, and only push the most relevant stuff to me. I'd like to ask everyone:

1. Besides web scraping and large language models, do I need any other technologies?

2. Besides writing a dedicated scraper for each website, is there a simpler technology available?

3. I plan to have every piece of information analyzed by a large language model to see if it meets my criteria, but it feels like it consumes a lot of tokens. Is there a more cost-effective way?

4. Is my technical approach completely wrong? Is there an easier way?


  👤 boivr Accepted Answer ✓
Its a complex problem cause -

1. Info is exploding while the time you have available per day to consume info is finite. This time can be divided between Info that has short term value, long term value, no value (ie entertainment).

2. Since info is exploding, a gap grows every day between supply and demand. If you run an automated process every day it can easily overwhelm, what your actual need in the 3 categories cuz it will easily generate more content than you have time.

3. Complicating everything further is People's Needs constantly change with time. In all 3 categories.


👤 Dahmonium1
1. automation and presentation 2. How about RSS ? 3. Local llm? 4. You say criteria, but as in keywords? Like "topics: design, designer, design trends" etc? I would suggest it would be profile based like "I'm a 25 year old designer from NY interested in..." etc.

👤 cranberryturkey
just use perplexity