Built in partnership with my colleague Ben Goldin.
What it is
Keeping up with what the government is doing is harder and more stressful than it should be. Most options are either engaging but slanted, or balanced but dry. Apathetic Times aims for objective and engaging.
Each day it takes one report from the Congressional Research Service, Congress's nonpartisan research group, and turns it into a briefing you can read in under five minutes. It has no spin and never mentions political parties. You and a few friends share a room, vote for or against the day's statement on a scale from "No way" to "Totally", and talk it over.
How it's built
- A daily report pipeline. Every morning a set of Cloudflare Workflows finds new reports from Congress, pulls out their text, and summarizes each one. Every step retries on its own, so one bad report never holds up the rest.
- Briefings written with Claude. Claude picks the day's report and writes the briefing in a fixed structure, so the app always gets content it knows how to show.
- Real-time rooms. Each room lives in its own Durable Object on Cloudflare, so messages and votes reach everyone in the room instantly.
- No accounts. You pick a username and share a link, and the app installs from the browser.