TEAHOUSE News Bot

The TEAHOUSE community runs TH NEWS POST, a Telegram channel with a weekly fintech digest. Every issue means reading a dozen news sites, picking the stories that matter, writing a dozen headlines in the channel's format, finding a cover and posting on time — every single week. The brief was to automate that routine without handing the channel over to a model: the editor keeps the last word, the AI must never invent a story or a link, and every post has to fit Telegram's formatting and length limits.

• News harvested from nine sources — Finextra, The Paypers, Finance Magnates, CoinDesk, Latvijas Banka and others — via RSS, sitemaps or page parsing; paste any URL and the bot detects the feed type itself
• Duplicates dropped by content hash, old articles pruned on a schedule, and every source weighted so stronger outlets rank higher
• AI editor in three passes: it puts each article into a category, scores it 0–100 with a one-line reason against editorial criteria the client writes in plain words, then writes the digest from the best-scored stories
• Hallucination guard: the model refers to stories by id, never by URL — the server substitutes the real links and drops any line whose link it cannot verify
• Provider-agnostic text AI — Groq (Llama, GPT-OSS), Anthropic, OpenAI or Google Gemini — switched in settings, with a connection test
• Covers from a photo library sorted by category, or generated by AI through Pollinations (Flux), Cloudflare Workers AI, Google Imagen or fal.ai
• Every Sunday the bot collects the week and builds a draft; the editor gets a preview in Telegram and publishes with one tap — now, in the default Monday-morning slot or at any time — with an optional heads-up before it goes out
• "Tea posts": standalone posts the AI writes in the channel’s own voice from a one-line topic, with a generated cover
• Telegram-native output: MarkdownV2 escaped automatically, captions and messages kept inside the 1024 / 4096-character limits, link previews instead of bare URLs
• Web admin with a health dashboard, pipeline and calendar, articles with their AI scores, sources, photo library, channel-reaction analytics and an operator guide in Russian
• Optional cross-posting of each digest to LinkedIn
• Self-hosted in Docker on a VPS behind Caddy with automatic TLS, push-to-deploy and daily database backups

Putting the weekly digest together now comes down to reviewing a draft and one tap in Telegram: on Sunday the bot collects and ranks the week's fintech news, and by Monday morning the issue is on the channel. Editorial control stays with a person — the criteria are plain text the client edits, every score comes with its reason, and the model cannot put an invented story or link on the channel.