Work, System Design
An executive-readout architecture for monitoring digests
A config-driven, multi-deployment monitoring engine that leads with judgment: the readout comes first, the evidence follows, and a language model never decides what matters.
The design
problem
Most automated digests are newsletters: a wall of story cards ranked by recency, with the actual judgment, does anything here need attention?, left to the reader. A reader with ninety seconds needs the conclusion first.
The hard case is the quiet day. A system that can honestly say nothing crossed the bar today earns the right to be read carefully when something does, so that case has its own test.
One item crossed the priority bar overnight; three on standing watch. All monitored sources reporting.
A coordinated set of posts misattributed a policy reversal to the organization, gaining traction on two regional networks overnight.
Readout first. The conclusion leads; evidence follows. Ninety seconds is enough to know whether to act.
What / why / step. Every priority finding carries all three, never an alert without a recommended move.
Standing watch, not filler. Awareness items sit apart from action items, so the priority bar stays meaningful.
Coverage note closes the loop. What was scanned and what went dark, the reader always knows the evidence base.
"Tier assignment is computed in code, before any model call. The model writes the analysis for each tier, it never assigns the tier."
, the same rule as my harmful-information pipelines: the model summarises what passes the gate; it never decides what passes.
Multi-deployment by config. One engine, many deployments, each is a YAML file. The expertise lives in the config: terms, weights, and per-lens prompt content are the product; the engine just runs them. Per-deployment keys isolate one deployment's credit exhaustion from the rest.
Committed state files survive scheduler retries and same-day races. A confirmed send is the only thing that writes state.
An empty feed or malformed output blocks the send rather than shipping a confident edition on a narrowed base. A skipped edition is recoverable; a wrong one in an inbox is not.
Personal project · Python, GitHub Actions, Claude API · built in a Claude Code session from a written specification · repository private. Engineering write-up only, this page describes a system, not a service.
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