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 PostgresPrinciples
- 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.