A zero-noise, terminal-aesthetic daily dashboard for software engineers.
ShellSignal is an automated newsroom that aggregates the top developer stories, analyzes their open-source health, and uses AI to generate ultra-concise, technical executive summaries. Built completely in the cloud.
- Daily Automated Briefs: A Vercel Cron job wakes up every morning to curate the day's top technical news.
- AI Executive Summaries: Integrates with OpenRouter (using frontier models like Grok/Llama) to distill hours of reading into 3 sharp, technical bullet points.
- Dev Health Metrics: Cross-references trending repositories with the GitHub API to display real-time stars, open issues, and last commit times.
- Native Markdown Parsing: Custom React Markdown pipeline maps AI outputs directly to native CSS variables for a seamless terminal aesthetic.
- Edge-Optimized: Utilizes Next.js App Router and aggressive caching strategies for instant load times.
- The Cron Trigger: Vercel fires a secured API route (
/api/cron/daily-brief) daily. - Data Aggregation: The backend fetches the top 10 trending stories from Hacker News.
- Enrichment: Links are parsed. If a story points to GitHub, the GitHub API is queried to append repository "health" metrics.
- AI Pipeline: The raw JSON payload is cleaned and passed to OpenRouter. A strict prompt constraint forces the AI to output pure markdown bullets without conversational filler.
- Storage: The enriched data and AI summary are upserted into a Supabase PostgreSQL database.
- Delivery: The Next.js frontend fetches the cached daily brief and renders the markdown securely.
- Framework: Next.js (App Router) / React
- Database: Supabase (PostgreSQL)
- AI: OpenRouter API (Auto-routing to the best available free frontier model)
- Hosting & CI/CD: Vercel
- Styling: Custom Terminal CSS Variables (
var(--bg2),var(--green),var(--amber))
To run this project, you will need to add the following environment variables to your .env or Vercel dashboard:
SUPABASE_URL - Your Supabase project URL
SUPABASE_SERVICE_ROLE_KEY - Supabase admin key for the cron job bypass
OPENROUTER_API_KEY - Key for AI summary generation
CRON_SECRET - Security token to authorize the daily Vercel cron job
GITHUB_TOKEN - (Optional) To bypass GitHub API rate limits
Built with 💻 and ☕ by [Brighto G]