Creating Unspun AI.
Creating a smarter way to read the news. Created and built Unspun AI, a bias-detecting news platform that delivers clean summaries, source analysis, and personalized briefings without the spin.
Behind The Scenes.
Unspun AI started as a weekend hackathon project called Niki News Alerts. I was tired of sifting through politically and corporately spun headlines to find out what actually happened. I wanted the raw facts, not the narrative. So I built something to do it for me — with zero coding experience and Claude Code as my co-pilot.
What began as a simple bias-detecting news app quickly evolved into a full platform. Unspun AI now delivers daily briefings with media consensus checks, source reliability ratings, and real-time social sentiment analysis powered by data from X. Users can ask follow-up questions about any story through a Perplexity integration, build personalized profiles around the industries, companies, and people they care about, and listen to broadcast-quality audio briefings powered by ElevenLabs.
Throughout my career, I've loved shaping the story behind innovative products and building the processes that bring communications teams together. Unspun AI was different. For the first time, I was the visionary, the engineer, the designer, the customer, and the communicator. Watching an idea go from a weekend hackathon project to something people use every morning — that's a feeling I hadn't experienced before, and I haven't stopped building since.
Under The Hood
Unspun AI is powered by a suite of tools and APIs I discovered as I scaled it up over the first few weeks of building. Here's what's under the hood:
Claude Code — The reason this exists at all. I had zero coding experience, and Claude acted as my AI pair programmer, building the entire app architecture, API integrations, database schemas, and frontend components alongside me.
Railway — Where Unspun AI lives. Production hosting with continuous deployment from GitHub, every push to main auto-builds and ships in minutes, so I can go from idea to live update before my coffee gets cold.
Turso — The brain that remembers you. A distributed SQLite database at the edge that stores user profiles, briefing preferences, and story indexing with low-latency reads and zero server management.
X API — The pulse of public opinion. Ingests real-time social data and cross-references post volume, engagement patterns, and conversational tone to show how people are actually reacting to each story.
Perplexity API — The "wait, tell me more" button. Powers the Dig Deeper feature with retrieval-augmented generation, giving users sourced, conversational answers to follow-up questions on any story.
ElevenLabs API — The voice of Unspun AI. Neural text-to-speech that generates broadcast-quality audio briefings synthesized in real time from each morning's content. The Drew voice is my personal favorite.