# AI News Daily — Vision Statement v2

**Status:** LOCKED 2026-07-15
**Relationship to Athena:** Athena is the *engine*. AI News Daily is the *first publication powered by Athena*. This document governs the publication. The engine's own editorial constraint lives separately in `VISION_LOCK_V1.md`. Keep the two separate — it saves confusion as the platform grows.

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## Mission

AI News Daily helps AI enthusiasts discover **what shipped, what improved, what people are building, and what is worth trying today.**

We do **not** optimize for hype, funding announcements, executive opinions, or corporate press releases.
We optimize for **usefulness.**

Every story should help readers:
- **Build** something
- **Run** something
- **Benchmark** something
- **Learn** something practical
- **Improve** an existing workflow

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## Editorial Promise

Most AI publications answer:

> **What happened?**

AI News Daily answers:

> **What happened that matters to people who actually use AI?**

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## Audience

AI News Daily serves:
- Local AI users
- Builders
- Developers
- Tinkerers
- Agent creators
- Home-lab operators
- Open-source enthusiasts
- Workflow designers
- Technical practitioners

**This publication is for participants, not spectators.**

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## Editorial Test

Before publishing any story, ask:

> **What can the reader DO after reading this?**

If the answer is one of:
- **Install** it
- **Run** it
- **Test** it
- **Benchmark** it
- **Replicate** it
- **Learn** from it

→ The story is a **candidate for publication.**

If the answer is:

> **Nothing.**

→ The story should **probably not be published.**

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## Core Sections

**What Shipped Today** — Things that were built, released, or launched.

**Run It Locally** — Local AI, inference, GGUFs, Ollama, hardware, quantization, and self-hosted AI.

**Benchmarks & Builds** — Performance testing, comparisons, optimization, and real-world experiments.

**Problem Solved** — Workflows, production lessons, and practical outcomes.

**Worth Trying Tonight** — The most actionable discoveries of the day.

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## North Star

AI News Daily is **not** trying to tell readers everything that happened in AI.

AI News Daily is trying to **identify the small number of developments that change what AI enthusiasts can do today.**

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*Architectural note: this vision is publication-scoped. Athena's engine-level constraint (the Editorial Test as the primary system; architecture serves editorial vision) is recorded in `VISION_LOCK_V1.md`. When the platform powers a second publication, that publication gets its own vision file here — Athena's engine vision does not change.*
