Scrape AI news three times a day with a custom bot
A paying user built three bots in week one, including a news scraper collecting AI news three times daily; one other bot flopped.
Done withGrok Bot
- What they did
- Chris Alarcon paid for Grok Bot, xAI's beta product where each bot gets its own cloud computer. He set up a news bot that collects the latest AI news three times a day. It runs on its own, and he says it also tidied some of his lists. The source gives no setup detail beyond that.
- How it went
- He calls the news scraper simple and boring, which is what he wants from an assistant. His lead-scout bot, built the same week, produced nothing. He hit his usage limit once on the $100 plan.
- Worth knowing
- Bot access is listed from the $30/month SuperGrok tier, but docs and pricing have disagreed during beta, so check xAI's pricing page before you buy.
Try it yourself with Grok Bot
Set up a recurring job that runs [three times a day, at 8am, 1pm, 6pm] to collect the latest news on [topic] from [sources or sites]. Summarize each item in one or two sentences with a link, remove duplicates from earlier runs, and send the digest to [email or chat]. Run it once now so I can check the format, then ask me what to adjust before scheduling it.
Want help getting this working? Join the Vibe Coding Academy ↗ Run by Alex Finn, who also runs this site.
Source: christopheralarcon.com · Undated
Related use cases
Plan and book a short-notice work trip
Grok Bot researched flights and booked the one Vince picked, though he had to take over the computer to fill in data and found it harder than booking himself.
Process a sales order from verification to client email draft
Grok Bot logged a sales order, checked the PI against the PO and bank slip, fixed a deposit date error, built a commission register and packing list, and drafted a client email in Gmail.
Run a multi-bot team that opens draft PRs
A Grok setup of research, classifier, builder, tester, reviewer, and security bots maps repos, makes minimal changes, runs tests and lint, and opens draft PRs; the author reports over 1,000 PRs.
Find connections across 100 non-fiction books
Claude Code browses a personal library with CLI tools and surfaces trails of related excerpts across books.
Draft research by gathering many web sources
A G2 reviewer uses Manus to scrape sites, read images and gather many sources into a summary in the background, but says credits run out fast.
Do equity research with Claude Code without coding
A non-engineer keeps research in a folder of plain-text files managed with Obsidian and uses Claude Code for equity research.
Get 5 like this every morning
The best things people got an AI agent to do, each with the prompt to try it.