Citizen's Daily Brief

The President’s Daily Brief is arguably the most consequential document the United States government produces each day. Thousands of analysts, classified sources, one reader. Its format is the interesting part: assessed information rather than news, with explicit confidence levels, shown reasoning, and disclosed sources. Here’s what we think it means, how sure we are, and what we don’t know.

I thought a public version of that should exist, and that it should be entirely automated by AI with no pretense otherwise. I also thought the idea was too ambitious and borderline arrogant, and I said so at the time. I built it anyway. Citizen’s Daily Brief reads a few dozen feeds every morning and produces a structured brief with trust signals and the reasoning visible, for about two dollars a day in compute. No login, no feed, no engagement mechanics, and deliberately boring by design, because the point is to be finished reading it.

It’s the product where I worked out what an LLM is for when it isn’t the product, and where a lot of the thinking in the essays about judgment and trust got tested against something real every single morning.