How to Stay Updated on AI as a Software Developer — Without the Noise

What you'll build

Generic AI newsletters write for everyone at once — marketers, researchers, your CTO. None of them care that you build on a specific runtime with specific SDKs, and that one minor-version bump matters more to you than any keynote.

MorningMail flips that. You write one instruction — like a ticket for a sharp colleague — and every morning an agent searches the web from scratch and writes the email itself. It's not a link forwarder like Google Alerts: it reads, filters, and reports back with sources you can verify in one click.

And your prompt carries your context permanently. Adopt a new framework tonight? Add its name, and tomorrow's edition covers it. Your reading list becomes one sentence you maintain — not thirty subscriptions.

Step by step: from zero to your first edition

The whole setup takes about two minutes. And every screenshot below comes straight from the real product — nothing is mocked up.

1. Step 1 Open morningmail.ai

   Head over to morningmail.ai. You'll see a sample edition and the Compose button — that's your entry point. Nothing to install; everything runs in the browser.

   

2. Step 2 Create your free account

   Sign up with your Google account. Every new account comes with a free first edition built in — so you can send yourself a real email before paying a cent.

   

3. Step 3 Create your first template

   A template is the blueprint of your email: name, delivery time, recipients, and your content sections. Click "New template" and the builder opens with a live preview right next to the editor. Everything saves automatically — there is no save button to forget.

   

4. Step 4 Add a news section

   Click "Add section +" and pick "News topic". You'll see six starters — real, editable prompts for a city, a sports club, a company, a tech topic, a professional field, and a personal interest. Pick one, and you're thirty seconds away from a working brief.

   

5. Step 5 Make it yours: AI developer tools

   Pick the "Tech topic" starter card and type AI developer tools into the highlighted field. The card rewrites its prompt live as you type, so before you save anything, you can read the exact instruction your agent will run tomorrow morning.

   That prompt is already strict: releases with version numbers, papers with benchmarks, repos crossing real thresholds — no hype threads, no leaks, primary sources linked. It gets sharper with your stack in it. I'd append something like: "I ship TypeScript on Node and call the Anthropic and OpenAI APIs in production. Flag SDK breaking changes, deprecation timelines, and anything that moves context windows or per-token pricing."

   

   The exact prompt your section starts with

   For a senior engineer who already reads HN. Real changes in AI developer tools today: releases with version numbers, papers with benchmarks, repos that crossed a threshold worth knowing. Skip hype threads, pre-announcement leaks, and recycled summaries. Always link primary sources.

6. Step 6 Set your delivery time and send yourself a test

   Almost there! Choose when the email should arrive and add your address as a recipient. Hit "Send test" — your first edition is free — and check your inbox. If something reads off, tweak the prompt and send again. Then flip the template to Active. Congratulations — you've just built your own morning brief!

   

Get more out of your brief

Name your dependencies, not your interests

"AI news for developers" is a mood; "changes affecting LangChain, the Vercel AI SDK, and the Anthropic TypeScript client" is a filter. The agent searches against your words every morning. The more your prompt reads like a package.json, the closer the brief tracks your real exposure.

Make version numbers a hard requirement

A story with a version number and a changelog is something you can act on in a pull request. A story without one is marketing. If the brief ever drifts, add "no announcements without a shipped artifact" to the prompt.

Ask for the migration cost, not just the release

Append "for each release, one line on what upgrading would touch" to your prompt. That single line turns the brief into standup input: you know whether a bump is a lockfile change or a refactor before anyone opens the changelog.

Schedule it before your standup, weekdays only

Every template has a delivery time and selectable weekdays. I'd pick 7:30, Monday to Friday: the brief lands with your coffee and is still fresh at standup — and your Saturday stays release-note-free 😊

Add a TLDR section on top for busy sprints

Stack a TLDR synthesis section above the news module and set it to three bullets. On heavy days you read only those; on quiet days you scroll into the detail. Length and tone are configured per section, so the summary stays terse while the deep dive stays deep.

Good sources to anchor your brief on

The agent searches the open web every morning and cites where it read things. These are the sources I'd point it at in your prompt:

• GitHub release pages of your core dependencies — The ground truth for what actually shipped: version numbers, breaking changes, migration notes. A good brief cites the release tag itself, not a blog post about it.
• Anthropic & OpenAI API changelogs — Where deprecation timelines, model snapshots and pricing changes appear first — the quiet entries that decide whether your integration keeps working.
• Hacker News — Still the fastest filter for what working engineers take seriously. Treat it as a traction signal and follow its links to the source.
• Simon Willison's Weblog — The reference practitioner log for LLM tooling — hands-on evaluations of new models and APIs within hours of release, with reproducible examples.
• arXiv (cs.SE / cs.AI) — Where benchmarked capability claims live before the marketing does. Relevant when a paper's numbers, not a press release, should decide your architecture.
• Latent Space — Engineering-first coverage of the AI tooling ecosystem — good for the why behind releases and which abstractions are actually winning.

Frequently asked questions

What does a daily brief cost?

The first edition is free — no credit card. After that, each send costs a few credits per section, priced by the AI model tier that section uses. Unused credits never expire, so pausing for a sprint costs you nothing.

Why not just use Google Alerts for this?

Because Alerts mail you links, and the triage is still your job — "AI developer tools" as a keyword drowns you in press releases. MorningMail's agent searches fresh each morning, discards the hype, and writes the email itself, version numbers and primary sources included.

Can I pin the brief to my exact stack?

Yes — the prompt is plain, editable text. Name your frameworks, SDKs, even individual repositories, and the agent searches against those exact terms every morning. When your stack changes, you change one sentence.

How does it avoid recycled hype?

The starter prompt bakes the filter in: versioned releases, benchmarked papers, repos crossing real thresholds — and an explicit instruction to skip hype threads, leaks and re-summarised summaries. Every claim links its primary source, so you can audit any story in one click.

Do I have to get it every day?

No. Each template has a delivery time and selectable weekdays — I'd start with Monday to Friday before standup. A weekly Monday digest works too if daily feels like too much.