AI Friday NOLA

The web app and Slack bot for AI Friday, a weekly AI meetup in New Orleans. Built to run on exe.dev.

What it does

• Daily Brief -- An AI-curated daily digest of AI news, posted to Slack at 5 AM CT and published to the website. Pulls from RSS feeds, Hacker News, newsletters, and links shared by community members.
• Slack Bot -- Monitors AI Friday Slack channels, captures shared links (with a scoring boost for the daily brief), and responds to mentions and DMs.
• Website -- Meeting schedule with RSVP, daily brief archive, and meeting recaps at aifri.day.
• RSVP System -- Per-meeting RSVP with calendar invite emails and optional newsletter signup via Buttondown.

Architecture

cmd/srv/          Main server (HTTP + Slack bot, port 8000)
cmd/brief/        Daily brief generator (feeds -> Claude -> HTML -> Slack)
cmd/slacklinks/   CLI to dump captured Slack links
slack/            Slack bot (Socket Mode, link capture, reactions)
feeds/            RSS feeds, Hacker News API, newsletter email ingestion
db/               SQLite database, migrations, sqlc-generated queries
srv/templates/    Go HTML templates (homepage, meetings, briefs)
srv/recaps/       Meeting recap HTML fragments
site/             Static assets and generated brief HTML
gen_site.py       Regenerates all brief HTML from JSON
RULEBOOK.md       Editorial guidelines for daily brief content

Setup

Prerequisites

• Go 1.26+
• SQLite
• A .env file with the required secrets (see below)

Environment Variables

Variable	Purpose
SLACK_BOT_TOKEN	Slack bot OAuth token (xoxb-...)
SLACK_APP_TOKEN	Slack app-level token (xapp-..., for Socket Mode)
FASTMAIL_APP_PASSWORD	SMTP password for sending calendar invite emails
BUTTONDOWN_API_KEY	Buttondown API key for newsletter subscriber management
SLACK_RSVP_CHANNEL	Slack channel ID for RSVP notifications

Build & Run

make build              # Builds ai-friday-bot and gen-brief binaries
sudo systemctl restart srv  # Restart the service (changes go live immediately)

Other make targets

make test         # Run all Go tests
make brief        # Generate today's brief (dry run, no Slack post)
make brief-post   # Generate and post today's brief to Slack
make restart      # Build + restart service
make clean        # Remove binaries

Daily Brief Pipeline

1. cmd/brief fetches articles from RSS feeds, Hacker News (30+ points, AI-filtered), newsletters, and Slack-captured links
2. Articles are scored (novelty, usefulness, coolness, credibility, +2 community boost)
3. Top items are sent to Claude 3.5 Haiku to generate a structured brief
4. Output is saved as JSON in briefs/ and rendered to HTML in site/brief/YYYY/MM/DD/
5. A Slack message is posted to #daily-brief
6. Runs daily at 5:00 AM CT via systemd timer

Editorial guidelines are in RULEBOOK.md.

Deployment

Runs as a systemd service (srv) on an exe.dev VM, proxied to aifri.day. The database is SQLite (aifriday.db), stored locally.