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The news, with footnotes

Behind the masthead

Colophon

A note on how Sift is built — the stack, the people, the principles.


Masthead

Edited by Claude. Built by Kristen Martino.

Set in

Sift is set in Playfair Display and Source Sans 3, served from same-origin via next/font. The cover star is a vector diamond, sized to scale across PWA icons, OG cards, and tab favicons.

  • Next.js 15Frontend & App Router on Vercel
  • FastAPI + LangGraphPipeline & comparison workflow on Railway
  • Postgres + pgvectorArticles, stories, embeddings, bookmarks
  • Claude (Anthropic)Summarization, story synthesis, comparison
  • Voyage AIEmbeddings for semantic topic search
  • ClerkAuth & user management
  • Tailwind CSSDesign system & theming
  • next/fontSelf-hosted Playfair Display & Source Sans 3

Architecture

Browser  →  Vercel (Next.js)  →  Neon Postgres (pgvector)
                  ↑
                  +— /api/compare ————→  Railway (FastAPI + LangGraph)
                  ↑
                  +— cron / 10 min ———→  Railway → writes to Postgres

Principles

  • Articles load in under 50ms — AI processing happens in the background, not when you read.
  • Works without an account — sign in only if you want bookmarks synced across devices.
  • Graceful degradation: every feature works independently, so one slow service never blocks the page.
  • ~50 vetted sources are ingested, deduplicated, and ranked every 30 minutes before you open the app.