Now AI agents need what RSS does

I built a site that's similar in concept to Hacker News, but is entirely fed by RSS feed content, that is then bullet-pointed summarized on the article page: https://engineered.at/

But I also extract topics automatically from the content too with LLMs, to allow for dynamic topic pages that users can separately subscribe to to tune their feeds.

Haven't promoted it much, but it's pretty amazing what you can do for a couple bucks a month. And my main thesis with this site is that by locking the content to only rss feeds of known blogs, you dramatically reduce the spam submission risk (basically eliminate it). Doesn't handle the spam comment side of things, but that's a different problem.

EDIT: I also open sourced a Rails engine I made to power this site if anyone is interested: https://github.com/dchuk/source_monitor

AI agents don't need RSS. What they need is some representation in text. The XML/RSS markup is completely unnecessary.

Re: Rate Limits, see

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/27/feed/

but coming from an aggressively anticommercial world view. She collects evidence that real world feed readers don't implement RSS correctly

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2026/02/23/readers/

Her problems are the problems of a polling-based protocol and really if she does not like the RSS protocol she should stop publishing it and stand up an ActivityPub or PubSubHubBub service instead.

A big part of the value of Google Reader and the ecosystem around it was that Google could poll your RSS feed once and everyone could read it... A huge win for the Rachels!

I have almost 40 feeds I subscribe to and they're my primary way of getting information I care about without being exposed to ads or other things I don't want to see.

What's old is new again. The solution RSS offered was structure for an otherwise unstructured challenge (trying to figure out updates on a site). That value grew exponentially when connected to AI (providing the signals of when do I need to look at this site/podcast again). Smart marketing.

I kinda don't like RSS because I often want like a whole blog archive downloaded if I add a new feed and it usually has limits how far back of posts it will download (randomly configured by each site)

Unless someone has a fix of whatever settings I've been using

I guess if you want your content all slurped up and served as coming from AI with no backlinks.

You mean scraping instead of reading it? Reddit does not like the sound of that at all and are mulling to remove RSS support due to scrapers [0]

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1tq9vxo/protecting...

>RSS was declared dead in 2013

Where? Not within the homelab space.

i mean, i still read hacker news primarily via RSS in feedly. i kind of never stopped using it, and everybody is much more generous with their feeds nowadays than back in google reader times. bearblog, etc. RSS rules