Micro app 17: The Cooldown
One of the cool things about the agentic coding era is how quick it is to iterate on an idea and see if it's worth pursuing further. When I was on a run yesterday, I had an idea for the a website called The Cooldown, which was a landing page people could go to at the end of their work day to catch up on the tech news of the day. Yes, this sort of thing exists already, but I thought I could do something interesting with my personalized RSS feed collection I've built up over the past 20 years. Techmeme, but with more indie voices.
The idea was at 4PM Central, the site would pull the RSS feeds for a bunch of sites that do good tech reporting, and then use a Gemini prompt to figure out what topics and articles would be most interesting. Gemini would return the structured data to the website, which would be stored in a database and presented to visitors.
I also thought that people like to read the news over breakfast, so I also set up a second run that was at 4AM that did the same thing. That would restyle the page and would call itself "The Warm Up".
I even have a nice little animation as you move to older reports that I thought was delightful.
If this had legs, the plan would also be to add user accounts, likely with a paid tier, that let users receive these updates as an email, to add their own feeds, and maybe even let them link their Quick Reads account to instantly save articles here to their reading queue.
I have this working on my local machine, and it's technically production-ready for everything besides the user sign up. However, I'm not convinced this really is anything. As I said, other sites already exist that do something like this, and I don't think mine is differentiated enough to really catch on. Also, it must be said that if the goal is to catch up on the news, indie blogs aren't usually where that happens, so I'd still be linking to a lot of the big hitters anyway.
Maybe this will be the seed that sprouts another idea in the future, but for now, I don't think this is it.
