ZekeLabs

The Digital Novice

Status
Live
Role
Architect and operator. Designed the engine, its gates and its specs; AI wrote all of the code.
Stack
Next.js, Claude API, Supabase, Resend, Stripe, Replicate, Vercel
Updated
Nov 2026

A fully autonomous AI newsletter. Every day it reads trusted sources, writes and illustrates the issue, and publishes only if a second model passes it.

Open www.thedigitalnovice.com

A published issue of The Digital Novice: the headline AI-Generated Voices Are Now Placing Fake Emergency Calls to 911 Dispatchers, dated November 11, 2026, above an AI-drawn header image of the raccoon mascot next to a dispatch alarm.
A daily issue, written, illustrated, checked and sent with no one at the keyboard.
The newsletter's issue board: six recent issues, each with its own AI-drawn header image, date, headline and summary.
Each issue gets its own header image, drawn to the topic.
The Digital Novice homepage: the masthead over an illustrated mountain landscape, the tagline Practical tips to spot scams, avoid fraud, and stay safe online, and an email subscribe box.
The public site and subscribe flow.

How it's put together

Each box is a part of the system. Dashed red marks the point where a person or a second model has to sign off.

Trusted news sourcesAI picks stories, skips repeatsAI drafts the issueOn-brand header imageReview model: no pass, no sendOne send a day, in sending hoursTrusted news sourcesAI picks stories, skips repeatsAI drafts the issueOn-brand header imageReview model: no pass, no sendOne send a day, in sending hours

Problem

A newsletter that needs a person every morning stops when the person does. Renting a platform instead costs a monthly fee or a cut of revenue, and the subscriber list lives on someone else’s platform.

What got built

An owned engine that publishes on its own. It reads a set of trusted sources, filters for the audience and skips stories it has already covered, drafts the issue in the publication’s voice and generates a header image for the topic. Before anything sends, a separate review model runs mechanical checks and then checks the draft against its sources. If any check fails or errors, nothing sends that day. It sends once a day, only inside set hours, through one sending route, with an off switch. It reports only when something is wrong.

Every change to the engine is approved by ZekeLabs. The daily issues go out on their own, behind the review model.

How it runs

The pipeline (fetch, filter, draft, review, send, observe) is generic. What makes it this publication is configuration: voice, sources, brand and audience. Swap the configuration and the same engine runs a different newsletter.

Result

Publishing unattended since early November 2026, after supervised runs before that. The subscriber list and the sending domain belong to the publication.

Want something like this built?

hello@zekelabs.dev