# AI News Daily — Story Tiers & Builder-Outcome DNA

**Publication:** aiND (see `AI_NEWS_DAILY_VISION_V2.md`)
**Status:** LOCKED 2026-07-15, part of Sprint 1.5 build plan
**Authority:** Story competition order. Higher tier wins when space is limited.

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## The DNA: Builder Outcomes

We are not primarily interested in: announcements, predictions, funding, lawsuits, CEO opinions.
We are interested in: **what did somebody actually accomplish?**

Examples of Builder Outcomes:
- Saved money
- Saved time
- Built something useful
- Got customers
- Reduced token costs
- Increased throughput
- Shipped a product
- Solved a problem

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## 7-Tier Hierarchy (competition order)

| Tier | Name | Examples | Coverage |
|------|------|----------|----------|
| **T1** | Builder Outcomes | "I reduced token spend 70%", "I replaced API costs with local models", "I automated my reporting", "I got my first paying customer" | Gold |
| **T2** | What Shipped Today | New OSS projects, agents, tools, releases | High |
| **T3** | Run It Locally | GGUF, Ollama, llama.cpp, VRAM discoveries, quantizations | High |
| **T4** | Benchmarks & Builds | GPU testing, throughput, home-lab experiments, HW optimization | Medium |
| **T5** | Problem Solved | Production lessons, cost reductions, workflow improvements | Medium |
| **T6** | Important Developments | Major model releases, API changes, significant platform changes | **Practitioner-gate only** |
| **T7** | Noise | Funding, lawsuits, CEO comments, valuations | Near-zero |

### T6 Practitioner Gate (mandatory)
A T6 item is included **only if** a practitioner can act on it: must migrate an API, can run the model locally, or it changes your stack. A model release with no reproducible substance drops to T7.

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## The Four Editorial Questions

Every candidate story should answer:
1. **What happened?**
2. **What was shipped?**
3. **What useful thing did somebody accomplish?**
4. **What can the reader do with this?**

The strongest stories answer all four. T1 stories always answer 3 and 4.

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## Engine Note (Athena)
T1 has **no engine signal yet** — the Sprint 1 scorer measures shipping/utility/replication/enthusiast/novelty, not accomplishment. `actionability_score` is reserved (currently 0) as the future home for T1 detection. Until Sprint 2+, T1 ranking is **human curation only**.

## Sprint 1.5 Scope
Produce multiple hand-curated editions (Issue 002+) from live data. No Lens, no Narratives, no Memory, no Knowledge Graph. Success metric is human: *"Would I miss today's edition if it didn't arrive?"* — not clicks, score, or rank.
