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Daily build note · April 29, 2026

LocalPulse: AI-Powered City Council Meeting Digest

A consumer-facing weekly AI digest of local city council meetings delivered by email.

Civic / Political Tracking Tools Runnable local MVP built Public demo coming soon

What shipped

This build delivers a focused LocalPulse sandbox MVP directly in the build root:

  • A runnable Node CLI that maps a ZIP to Nashville coverage, fetches or seeds a council meeting, summarizes it, and renders a digest email
  • A live-path Legistar fetcher designed for Nashville's public API, with demo fallback when network access or source structure fails
  • Anthropic summarization support through the raw Messages API plus a heuristic fallback that keeps the pipeline working without secrets
  • Resend delivery support through the raw email API plus an artifact preview path for local inspection
  • A static index.html landing page stub showing the ZIP coverage concept for the Nashville pilot
  • A smoke test that verifies the seeded end-to-end path and leaves inspectable output in artifacts/

Architecture

  • Zero external package dependencies. The sandbox could not rely on network installs, so the implementation uses built-in Node modules and direct HTTP calls.
  • CLI-first orchestration. The brief's autonomous build notes explicitly allowed a script-first slice, and that was the fastest path to a real end-to-end proof.
  • Dual execution modes. demo mode guarantees a working run; live mode reaches for Legistar, Anthropic, and Resend when the operator has credentials and network.
  • Inspectable artifacts. Every run writes HTML and JSON outputs to artifacts/ so a human can review the digest without any extra tooling.

Trimmed scope

To keep the MVP coherent and runnable in a smoke-test environment, I intentionally cut:

  • Supabase, auth, Stripe, cron wiring, and persistent subscription storage
  • Multi-city coverage beyond a Nashville ZIP slice
  • React Email and Next.js in favor of plain HTML rendering
  • Dedicated PDF parsing dependencies, replaced by OS-level extraction fallbacks
  • Real signup handling on the landing page

Limitations

  • The live Legistar endpoint shape may still need small field adjustments against Nashville's actual API responses because network verification was not available in this sandbox.
  • PDF extraction quality in live mode depends on textutil or strings, which is weaker than a dedicated parser like pdf-parse.
  • The heuristic summarizer is serviceable for demo fallback, but production quality depends on valid Anthropic credentials.
  • The static landing page is only a presentation stub, not a working subscriber capture system.

Suggested next steps

  1. Verify the Nashville Legistar endpoint shape against a real networked run and harden attachment discovery if needed.
  2. Replace the PDF extraction fallback with a proper parser package once installs are available.
  3. Add subscriber persistence and a small form handler so the landing page can trigger the digest pipeline.
  4. Expand the ZIP map and city config into a multi-city pilot dataset.
  5. Add a cron wrapper and digest cache so duplicate sends are avoided.