Why I built DIGEST
How an arXiv reading queue that grew faster than I could read it turned into a research newsletter I'd actually use.
The day I gave up keeping up with AI research was sometime in December.
I'd been trying to stay current the honest way: read the papers, not the threads. Every product I'm building touches AI in some way, and the difference between someone who's read the source material and someone who's read the hype is obvious in three sentences of conversation. So I read. By January my open-tabs folder had three figures of arXiv links in it. The queue was growing faster than I could read it. I was further behind than when I'd started.
So I built the tool I needed. Then I turned it into a product.
What DIGEST actually is
DIGEST is a research newsletter you assemble yourself. You pick an arXiv category. You pick a reader profile: Student, Researcher, Industry Pro, Curious Adult, or Quick Scan. You pick a cadence. The pipeline pulls the new papers, ranks them, summarises them at your level, and lands them in your inbox.
The profile is the whole point. The same paper rendered for Researcher reads like a methods note: what's novel, what the prior art is, where the gap is. The same paper rendered for Industry Pro reads like a build memo: what works in production, what doesn't, what's worth stealing. For me, the morning I'd been dreading became a fifteen-minute scan of five papers in cs.LG written for someone shipping product, not someone writing the next paper. That's the gap I needed closed, and the product that closed it.
Free tier is three summaries a day, one category, one profile. Pro is €5/month: unlimited categories, all five profiles, cross-reference analysis, email delivery on whatever cadence you want.
Where it stands
What works today: pick a category, pick a profile, get summaries delivered. Free tier is live. You can try it at digest.ltd. The rest gets built in public.
Two asks
First: try DIGEST and tell me what felt off. Not what do you think. What would you cut, what's missing, what's the moment you'd close the tab. That's the feedback I need at this stage. Email me directly at antoine@helmo-solutions.com.
Second: follow @helmo_solutions on X if you want to watch the rest of this get built. I post the work, scars included, in something close to real time.