My morning briefing

How I use AI to speed up my daily morning briefing.

Tags: ai homelabPosted on: 2026-05-20

I think when a lot of people hear about AI agents, and how they improve productivity, most think about large corporate workflows, or perhaps developers who use AI to help them code. That's certainly the most publicized use case, and I myself use AI to help write code. But there are many other ways I find AI to be a useful tool, so I thought I would just take a moment to post about one particularly easy, low friction use case where I'm now using LLMs as an assistant on a daily basis: the morning briefing!

Let me go over what I've implemented first, although it's more for context to see the types of things that can be done. You certainly don't need most of that stuff to implement this use case. I also want to note that I'm not here to sell any particular product or AI model. I just want to show how I do things, and perhaps give others some ideas.

This is my current workflow when it comes to AI:

• Most of my applications and data are self-hosted. I use Directus for tabular data, insights and automation; I use Dokuwiki for all my notes and documentation; I use Gitea for all my source code, among many other things.
• I built (with AI's help) a custom Python-based MCP server to connect Claude AI to my self-hosted applications. This allows me to chat with the AI and grant it granular access to my infrastructure. I can have it pull a wiki page, edit a page, push or pull code from my repos, open a pull request, pull data from Directus, etc. Everything is tightly controlled using ACLs and since I built everything myself, I know how the whole system works and don't depend on a cloud provider to maintain things.
• While I have deployed various apps that use the API of some AI models, I do most things from the mobile app. The benefits are that everything flows far more naturally through the chat interface, it's all included in the base price (no per-token cost), and I can even control a remote session of Claude Code running in a sandbox on my self-hosted environment.

So the setup: I created a new page on my wiki called morning_briefing and instructed Claude AI to read that page whenever I ask it to "run through my daily briefing". The page contains a series of instructions that I want the AI to run through. Now again, all of this scaffolding isn't necessary to replicate this use case. You could literally write the instructions in a CLAUDE.md text file that you share with the model. The point of giving more data and more access to the model is to get a better result, as you'll see shortly.

So what do those instructions contain? It would be different for everyone. For me, it looks something like this:

1. Before starting your tasks, check if today is a holiday or not.
2. Check the weather for the day.
3. Check for new music releases that match my taste.
4. Get new game releases that went viral, focus on PC gaming and Gacha games.
5. Get the day's news, focusing on world events, tech, anime related news and how the market is doing.
6. Go through my recent jobs, deployments and syslog entries and let me know if there's anything critical going on in my network.
7. Let me know if you find any trending videos on YouTube.

And finally, here's the result. This is verbatim what the AI produced for me this morning:

Here's your morning briefing for Wednesday, May 20, 2026. No Canadian or US holidays today.

🌤️ Weather — Montreal

High of 25°C today, mainly cloudy clearing early this afternoon. Wind west 30 km/h gusting to 50. UV index 8 (very high). Midday window (11am–4pm) should be pleasant once it clears — just note the gusty wind. Good day for a brief outdoor outing.

🎵 Music

Fresh KPop drops today that match your library:

• BIBI – "BUMPA" (single, May 20) and YOON SAN-HA (ASTRO) – "IDK ME" (mini album NO REASON, May 20)
• Yesterday: I.O.I – "Suddenly" (3rd mini album I.O.I : LOOP, May 19) and xikers – "OKay" (ROUTE ZERO: The ORA, May 19) — the I.O.I anniversary comeback is getting strong traction and fits your KPop taste.

🎮 Gaming News

PC/Steam:

• Forza Horizon 6 launched May 17 with a 92 on Metacritic — currently the highest-rated game of 2026, set in Japan. Steam Deck Verified.
• Subnautica 2 hit Steam Early Access this month, currently Steam's most wishlisted game. Paralives (life sim, long-awaited Sims competitor) also launched.
• Dead as Disco (rhythmic beat 'em up, Michael Jackson-inspired, neon arenas) is in Early Access and getting buzz.

Gacha:

• Arknights: Endfield is in Version 1.2 (Fest of Brilliance update). The Zhuang Fangyi banner runs until May 22 — last chance if you're pulling.
• NVIDIA earnings tonight after close could shake the entire gaming/AI hardware sector — worth monitoring.

📰 News Digest

Global:

• Xi Jinping welcomed Putin in Beijing today to reaffirm ties, days after Trump's own visit to China. NPR Drone strike near UAE's Barakah nuclear plant over the weekend — called an "unprovoked terrorist attack" by authorities.
• WHO expressing concern over rapid spread of a rare Ebola strain in Congo.
• Bolivia's president facing a deepening political crisis with widespread protests and blockades in the capital.

Tech / AI:

• Nvidia Q1 FY2027 earnings report tonight (after close) — analyst consensus around $79B revenue (+79% YoY). Widely seen as a bellwether for the AI infrastructure trade.
• Google and Blackstone reportedly partnering to build a new AI cloud infrastructure giant. Meta continuing layoffs to offset massive AI capex ($145B for 2026).
• Microsoft and OpenAI restructured to a non-exclusive partnership, opening up cloud AI competition. EU AI Act high-risk system obligations still on track for August 2026.
• Google I/O 2026 wrapped recently — Gemini is now deeply integrated across Search, Android, and productivity tools. New Gemini Omni Flash model can generate/edit video conversationally.

Anime / Japan:

• Crunchyroll crossed 21M paid subscribers globally, but its Japan branch saw a 63% drop in net profits for fiscal 2025.
• Japan-China International Animation Film Festival (JCIAFF) runs May 28–31 in Tokorozawa, with a free-to-stream industry conference on May 29 covering AI in animation and anti-piracy.
• Wit Studio apologized after AI-generated backgrounds were discovered in the opening of Ascendance of a Bookworm: Adopted Daughter of an Archduke — they were redrawn by episode 2.

S&P 500:

• S&P 500 closed at 7,353.61 yesterday — third straight losing session (-0.67%). Bond yields hitting multi-decade highs (30-year briefly at 5.19%) are pressuring equities. Futures are pointing slightly higher this morning ahead of Nvidia's report tonight.

🖥️ Dendory Network

Jobs & Deployments: All clear — no failures.

Syslog:

• The rappa node's pmxcfs cluster service failures (quorum/confdb/dcdb init errors) appeared again on May 17 — same pattern seen periodically since mid-2025. These look like recurring Proxmox cluster service restart artifacts rather than a new incident; likely benign if rappa is running fine. Worth a glance if you haven't looked at it in a while.
• The git node had a brief Forgejo DB engine abort on May 19 at 15:31 (shutdown-related). Likely just a restart — confirm Forgejo is accessible.

📺 YouTube Picks

Couldn't pull the live Canada trending page directly, but based on today's news hooks:

• Nvidia Q1 Earnings — multiple finance/tech channels will be livestreaming tonight's results; worth queuing up if you follow the AI trade.
• Forza Horizon 6 Japan map coverage — tons of content dropping this week given the May 17 launch. Google I/O 2026 recaps — Gemini Omni video generation and Search AI integration are generating heavy YouTube discussion right now.
• The Wit Studio / AI art controversy in Ascendance of a Bookworm is generating anime community discussion worth checking on ANN or YouTube.