Chat with your newsletters

Ever felt like your inbox is just... drowning in unread newsletters? Yeah, me too. This is kinda a story 'bout a dev (either-lazy-or-productive) who got to inbox-zero. Instead of reading every single article, they indexed all their newsletters so they could just... chat with relevant emails via an LLM.

Why I even bothered (aka: My Usecase)

I find newsletters way more interesting than just, Google search results. Unfortunately, my newsletters-only inbox has 300+ items to munch through, and seriously, I already don't even remember what I read last week.

Plus, I'll often remember reading some really good piece in a newsletter, somethin' that'd be super helpful right now. But try finding that specific one? It's like a needle in a haystack.

Okay, so two main types I'm talkin' about here:

1. Code stuff
I'm subbed to Dave's Friday iOS news, Swift tools and a few others. These gems curate links to top-notch blog posts by mobile indie devs. My absolute fave part is that they reference these awesome indie developer blogs. When you Google search, it's usually just StackOverflow and Apple's own dev site. The huge advantage of these indie blogs is they go so deep explaining Apple frameworks – often even deeper than Apple itself! Plus, so many include really creative implementations and code snippets for animations or features, always thinkin' about performance and other nuances. They know their stuff 'cause they actually profiled the code. (feature idea: mcp-performance-profiler for code that LLM produces)

2. Biz stuff (founder tips / startup advice)
Imho, articles from newsletters like founders@tldr are just gold for brainstorming and gettin' ideas validated. Referencing them in a chat steers convo in a certain direction where LLM tries to digest and synthesise an output from real world examples rather than thinking on its own (or hallucinating something based on the training data).

Data ownership & Indie trust

DevBrain indexes developers' tips. Being indie devs ourselves we respect original content. That's why DevBrain code includes logic to handle robots.txt. If you are an indie developer / publisher who does not want its content to get indexed by AI - use robots.txt. To tell DevBrain not to access your website add "SvenBrowser" user agent to a restricted browsers list.

Looking ahead

As a developer and a founder on a journey of struggle, my original motivation for DevBrain is simple: a tool/space to help others and get help from others.

Developers shouldn't just build, but they should absolutely own their products (become Founders). DevBrain contains data and links to amazing resources that can help Developers get into and thrive in a Founder role.

Got related ideas or wanna share your own use case? Code for DevBrain on GitHub: https://github.com/mimeCam/mcp-devbrain-stdio

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.