HA News
How the paper is built
An intelligence pipeline, not a blog CMS and not a swarm of agents. Sources in, one short brief out — then a human says yes before anything is public. Home Assistant is a section of the paper, not the name of it.
The pipeline
RSS and GitHub in. Dedupe. Score. Brief. Focused scripts, not a swarm of agents. A human gate before the public site.
RSS + GitHub
Poll releases, blogs, and ecosystem posts. Not social firehoses.
Collapse the copies
The same Home Assistant release shows up as a blog post, a GitHub tag, and six rewrites. Keep one.
Novelty and relevance
Rank for a running local stack. New core, Matter, ESPHome, or a break beats a retailer roundup.
One short file
What happened, why it matters, primary source. The pipeline logs every keep and reject.
Briefs are human-approved before they become the public site. There is no autonomous publishing.
Cadence
Weekdays, morning (America/Puerto_Rico):
- Daily brief — THE BRIEFING rail + /brief/YYYY-MM-DD. 5–10 scored items. What happened, why it matters, primary source.
- Daily news — if a story clears the bar, one short reported post in the center well (not a rewrite of the press release).
Weekly (Monday):
- One evergreen explainer — the thing a subscriber still needs in six months (Matter 1.5, Thread border routers, ESPHome kit, Home Assistant release changes).
Email: the list gets the daily brief every weekday once signup is live. Weekly explainer goes in Monday’s letter. The list is the asset. Quality over volume. Log every keep/reject in the pipeline (already true in the repo).
Coverage
Home automation — Home Assistant, Matter, Thread, ESPHome, Zigbee/Z-Wave, local-first hardware, energy, presence. Not broad consumer-tech, not retailer roundups.
The list
The subscribe control posts name, email, and phone to a Cloudflare Pages Function. The function is wired. The list is not live. We will not email or call until the brief is. Use the form in the masthead or the briefing rail — it records a waitlist entry when the function is up, and falls back to mailto:[email protected] if it is not.