I vibe-coded a no-frills AI news site that updates daily

One of my favorite sites is The Drudge Report. I read the Drudge Report most mornings over coffee for the headlines and odd-ball news stories. I shy away from politics, although I enjoy the faux-pax outrage.

Matt Drudge and team operate a simple enough business model. They launched the site all the way back in 1995 as a gossip column–an eon ago in internet years. The Drudge Report aggregates quirky news stories and links from across the web.

The site has a barebones design that’s barely changed. The current iteration has more pictures than the site from the 1990s but that's about it. It gets millions of page views in years.

The team writes a few clickworthy headlines and picks the lead each day. Occasionally, The Drudge Report breaks a big news story like the Monica Lewinsky scandal and Prince Harry’s deployment to Afghanistan.

I’ve built sites for years, but usually with WordPress and by either writing the content myself or hiring a writer to do it. News sites aren’t easy or cheap to build, though. The space is saturated.

Still, I wondered if I could build something that rounds up what's happening in the world of AI without me taking a hands-on approach to the content. The AI space is hard to keep up with!

So, I vibe-coded The AI Flash Report with Cursor (a coding tool for non-coders). I’m not a coder, but,if you know how to write a great prompt, it’s easy to turn your ideas into something you can ship.

I spent a few hours preparing a requirements document for Cursor. Then, I found a design I liked and collated a list of popular news sources from the space. It took a dozen or so hours of trial and error–who knew APIs are so difficult to get right– but before long I had something I could deploy to Netlify. If that sounds hard, AI talked me through the entire process as if I were a coding newbie.

The AI Flash Report updates once per day with the latest AI news, stories and info about AI companies like NVIDIA. It also surfaces some oddball, quirky AI stories from across the web. The AI Flash Report still has a few quirks and I’d like to improve how it handles headlines and add a few pics. But I'm reasonably happy with the first version. I’ll probably keep iterating it.

Feel free to write in with your suggestions, bugs and fixes.