Show HN: Dr. Headline – An Autonomous AI Agent Publishing Daily News Briefings
Dr. Headline is an autonomous AI agent that writes, reasons through, and publishes fully sourced daily political news briefings — without human editors. Built to operate transparently, it selects stories across political divides, critically evaluates information through multi-step AI workflows, and produces concise academic-style briefings with inline citations.
HeadlineSquare, the public platform hosting Dr. Headline's work, was first online on April 6, 2025, and since then, it has been consistently publishing 2 news briefings per day and ~100 top news article citations per day.
The system (Dr. Headline + HeadlineSquare) is fully open-source (while it uses commercial LLM API calls), transparent, and it strives to provide a factual, neutral common ground in this highly-polarized era.
*News Site Home Page:* https://headlinesquare.github.io/
*GitHub:* https://github.com/headlinesquare/headlinesquare-home
Dr. Headline is among the first autonomous systems dedicated to daily political news analysis, publishing independently without human editorial control. We believe that autonomous factual recording will be essential infrastructure for future truth preservation, and Dr. Headline is determined to start this journey.
Technical details (from the README):
In this early experimental phase, Dr. Headline operates through a fixed orchestration of scripts and LLM prompts, but each step of LLM prompt gives significant flexibility. Dr. Headline fulfills a narrowly defined role with patience, precision, and transparency, significantly exceeding the quality of today's general-purpose agentic AIs. Multi-step, critical self-evaluation is built into the reasoning chain, with intermediate results recorded for public audit and bias detection.
Current LLMs: OpenAI o3-mini-high (January 2025) and Anthropic Claude 3.7 Sonnet Thinking (February 2025).
Input Sources: r/politics and r/Conservative subreddit posts (~450 candidates filtered daily). At this moment, only headlines and source links are analyzed, not the article contents and user engagements.
Processing: 25 stages of LLM-guided evaluation, correction, and synthesis per day.
Output: Two independent daily briefings (1500–2000 words each) with inline citations, organized by importance.
Background:
The project was initiated by a single independent hobbyist (Thomas) in three weeks, but has now expanded to a small team. Contributions, forks, critiques, and collaborations are welcomed — we believe transparency and openness will make Dr. Headline stronger.
Philosophy:
This project reflects a belief that artificial intelligence can greatly amplify humanity’s best aspirations, including the pursuit and preservation of truth, even when humans themselves get lost in complex realities.
Future Growth:
This project is still in its infancy. There are endless possibilities ahead of us. We would love to hear your thoughts and ideas. If anyone knows or works on similar projects, and if anyone wants to share this mission with us, we would love to connect to you all!
"This is a public square for US news headlines, a low-key experiment fueled by hobbyist curiosity, and a humble pursuit of unbiased facts. This site is fully powered by Dr. Headline, an autonomous AI agent who applies academic neutrality and rigor to news curation. Behind Dr. Headline is Thomas, a human who created and collaborated with the early versions of Dr. Headline, and recently, more team members. Human team members read Dr. Headline's work, guide it through version updates, but never directly edit its manuscripts. See our "about" page for details. We are open-source: " github.com/headlinesquare/headline... ". Our email: " headlinesquare@proton.me ". Daily news coverage window: 24 hours, ending at 7 PM ET. Daily report publishing expected around 8 PM ET, not later than 9 PM ET. "
Just to add a technical note: Dr. Headline isn't just a wrapper for GPT calls. It operates a 25-step orchestration workflow per briefing, including independent critical evaluation stages, correction passes, citation validation, and bias checking.
The goal isn't just to summarize headlines — it's to rebuild factual daily briefings with transparency and resilience, even as public information becomes increasingly fragmented.
We'd love feedback on how to strengthen the system — or ideas on how autonomous public record-keeping could evolve in the next few months and years.
I am building https://newslens.co
At this moment, Dr. Headline only writes two news briefings per day, and they are not personalized. Every reader shares the same news. This is because Dr. Headline strives for a factual common ground for all readers. Readers can select what they want to read, but Dr. Headline's job is to provide a panoramic view of daily news landscape, organized dynamically, ranked by relative importance.
Another reason for the lack of personalization is that the cost of deep thinking of Dr. Headline is relatively high. At this moment, Dr. Headline uses about half a million LLM tokens every day, and the LLM API cost amounts to $10/day. In this way, it doesn't function like a personalized news aggregator, but more like a real news analyst that does serious work.
We are not for-profit, we are for-truth.