Obscure Bit

A daily publication of AI-generated speculative stories and curated links from obscure corners of the web.

🌐 obscurebit.com

Every day Obscure Bit publishes:

• Daily Bits: one story
• Obscure Links: one curated links post
• Daily Edition: a combined edition snapshot

Obscure Bit now uses a queue-first publishing model.

GitHub Actions schedule
    ↓
prepare_queue.py stages one or more dated editions
    ↓
publish_prepared.py promotes today's prepared edition into docs/
    ↓
MkDocs site updates and GitHub Pages deploys

That means the public site is no longer supposed to depend on live discovery succeeding in the same step that publishes the day’s content.

• scripts/backfill_registry.py bootstraps link-memory state if needed
• scripts/prepare_queue.py builds staged content under data/edition_queue/<date>/
• scripts/publish_prepared.py --update-home publishes today’s prepared edition
• scripts/publish_substack.py generates newsletter markdown/history
• GitHub Actions commits and pushes the resulting changes

• workflow_dispatch still runs scripts/run_daily.py directly as a one-off escape hatch
• Developers can also run generate_story.py, generate_links.py, and update_landing.py individually
• Backfills should usually use prepare_queue.py followed by publish_prepared.py

git clone https://github.com/obscurebit/b1ts.git
cd b1ts
uv venv
uv pip install --python .venv/bin/python -r requirements.txt
uv run --python .venv/bin/python mkdocs serve

# Prepare staged content for today and the next few dates
uv run --python .venv/bin/python scripts/prepare_queue.py

# Prepare a specific date
uv run --python .venv/bin/python scripts/prepare_queue.py --date 2026-04-19 --force

# Publish a prepared date
uv run --python .venv/bin/python scripts/publish_prepared.py --date 2026-04-19

# Direct manual run
uv run --python .venv/bin/python scripts/run_daily.py --date 2026-04-19

• Story generation uses deterministic date-seeded style modifiers from prompts/style_modifiers.yaml
• Link generation is lane-first and repo-memory-backed using prompts/source_lanes.yaml and data/discovery/
• run_daily.py can fall forward through multiple rotating themes when link generation fails for the first candidate theme

The repo still contains Substack tooling:

• scripts/publish_substack.py
• scripts/substack_playwright.py

In practice:

• CI currently uses publish_substack.py for newsletter markdown/history generation
• actual draft/publish actions remain explicit operator actions
• cookie/browser-based auth may still be needed because Substack automation is brittle

• DEVELOPMENT.md: setup, commands, workflows, backfills, style modifiers
• SYSTEM_DESIGN.md: architecture, queue model, data flow, failure handling

• Site: MkDocs Material
• Generation: OpenAI-compatible API, currently NVIDIA NIM by default
• Hosting: GitHub Pages
• Automation: GitHub Actions

MIT