I tried a few ways to keep up with AI news. AI newsletters, which at some point sat unread in my inbox or Reddit over coffee, which ate forty minutes when it should have been five. None of it stuck.
What stuck was putting the news straight into the file I open every morning anyway: my Daily Note in Obsidian. It already has today’s tasks and a notes section pre-filled by another n8n automation that summarizes yesterday’s tasks and notes (I’ll probably write that up at another time). So if yesterday’s top AI stories sit in there next to everything else, I either pick one and do something with it or I scroll past. No separate app, no inbox to drain.
What lands in the vault
An n8n workflow drops a file into the vault every morning with a predictable path like _/news/ai/2026-06-09.md. The content itself is being a bit boring but it serves its purpose.
- [Title of the top story](https://example.com/article)
- [Second story](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=...)
- [Third story](...)
My Daily Note template embeds that file as a wiki link, so by the time I open today’s daily note, the section is already there.
How the workflow is wired
The pipeline isn’t fancy. A schedule trigger fires at 01:30. Two date nodes give me today (for the filename) and yesterday (for the time window). At 01:30, yesterday’s news is the news that matters. Today’s hasn’t happened.
The request node hits the Algolia Hacker News API with query=AI, tags=story, hitsPerPage=20, and numericFilters=points>50. The points threshold does most of the work. Below 50 it’s mostly noise. Above 50 you find the stuff people are actually arguing about in the comments. A filter node then drops anything whose created_at falls outside yesterday’s window, because search_by_date will happily return older stories that match the query.
A small JavaScript node sorts what’s left by points and renders the bullet list. If nothing survives the filter, it writes a “no news” line instead of an empty file. The last node commits the result back to the vault with a message like n8n AI News: 2026-06-09 01:30:00.
Why I built it this way
I didn’t want another app, and I certainly wasn’t interested in another newsletter. The list is stored in a file that my “Daily Note” already accesses. So now I’ve neatly integrated everything into the one place where I plan my day every morning, all without any hassle.