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Documentation Index

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HN Summary app rendering a panel of five picked stories on the Hacker News front page
Pick the top five HN stories and summarize each.
  • Page · news.ycombinator.com
  • Action · Pick & summarize top stories
  • Result · Five stories with short summaries

The problem

Scan before opening tabs. The Hacker News front page is dense. You want to know which handful of stories are worth opening before you start clicking.

The prompt

A natural prompt for your coding agent:
Build a small Hacker News app.
Read the visible stories on the current page, pick the five worth opening, and add a short summary for each using their top comments.
Keep it factual and do not change the HN page.

Iterations

1

First pass

Make me a thing for Hacker News. Pick the top 5 stories I should
open right now and show them somewhere on the page.
2

Wait, those are just the top by points

Those are just the highest-voted ones. I wanted "worth opening" —
usually that means discussion depth, not popularity. Use comment
count and whether the first few comments actually say something,
not the score.
3

Add summaries — and don't make them up

Now add a 1–2 sentence summary under each pick. Pull from the
actual top comments on each story. If a comment is just a meme
or "this", skip it.
4

Stop covering the page

The panel is huge and right in the middle. Shrink it to a small
pill in a corner that expands when I click. Default state should
be barely there.
5

Refresh + Copy

Add a refresh button so I can re-pick after I scroll the page,
and a copy button so I can paste the 5 picks into Slack without
opening anything.
6

Don't touch HN itself

Just to be safe — none of this changes the HN page. No layout
shifts, no restyled links, no intercepted clicks. Pure overlay
on top.

Result

  • The app appears on Hacker News as a pill that opens a panel.
  • Summarize picks five stories from the visible list and adds a short summary for each.
  • Each card links back to the original story with points, comments, and site.
  • Copy gives the user the five picks without leaving the page.

Try it

Install Airglow

Clone the SDK repo and load the Chrome extension.

View source

Browse the HN Summary app under airglow-apps/hn-summary/.