Daily Kickoff

Every summary comes from one of three places: prose written by an AI system, the publisher's own summary reproduced as they wrote it, or the headline alone when nothing else was usable. Every card is one of those three, and the split moves as the pipeline changes.

When an AI system writes one, it writes from the publisher's article rather than from the publisher's own summary, and what it writes is checked before it appears: every figure and every name in the summary has to be present in the article. A summary that fails that check is not published. The card falls back to the publisher's own words instead, which is why the second number above exists.

The figure at the top of this page gives the current split exactly, because it is counted from the cards rather than written down here.

Selection is a separate question from writing, and it is answered below.

Software narrows first, and that part is mechanical. It drops anything published here before, anything too old, and anything with too little to it to be worth a card. It caps how much can come from any one publisher, so a prolific source cannot take the whole day. What survives is ranked, and the top of that ranking is the shortlist.

Ranking decides the rest. There is no separate step where something reads the shortlist and picks the interesting ones — the top of the ranking is what publishes, so the order above is the whole of the selection. Until that changes, every edition carries a Preview label saying so.

A model does read each chosen article and write the summary in place of the publisher's. It cannot add an item that was not shortlisted, and anything it returns that breaks one of the rules above is dropped without appeal.

Neither half of that step is something you have to take on trust. An edition the model has not judged is labelled Preview on the page.

Because the count follows what was published, rather than the other way round. Seven is the most that can appear in one day; there is no floor. Padding a list to hit a number is the fastest way to make it worthless, so a thin day stays thin and says why — a quiet pool, too little substance, nothing recent enough, or the per-publisher cap biting. Across 3 editions so far the daily count has run 3–7.

Roughly forty feeds: engineering blogs, AI and robotics press, research labs, the tooling vendors that agents and retrieval systems are built on, and industry trade press. Every card names the publisher it came from, so the working list is visible in the editions themselves rather than only in a page about them. Nothing is scraped from behind a paywall and nothing is rehosted — the link goes to the publisher.

If something that belongs here is missing, send it to hello@daily-kickoff.com.

No. There is no advertising, no sponsorship, no affiliate link and no paid placement, and there is no way to buy one. No publisher has a relationship with this site that could affect whether they appear, because there is no relationship to have. If that ever changes it will be marked on the card itself, not disclosed quietly on this page.

Write to hello@daily-kickoff.com and say which item. If something is wrong, it gets corrected. If you wrote the piece and would rather it was not listed, it comes down. No proof of ownership, no form, no argument — an unnecessary removal costs one card, which is cheaper than the alternative.

It does not come back. Removal is recorded against the item itself, and the software that picks each day's links never offers the same item twice — so a later night cannot quietly re-select something that was taken down. The edition page it was on says a card was removed, rather than silently showing one fewer.

Removal is not retroactive, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. The edition has already gone to feed readers and may sit in search caches, and neither is under this site's control.

No. There are no cookies, no analytics, no fingerprinting and no third-party scripts. No code runs in your browser on this site at all, so nothing is stored on your device and nothing is sent anywhere as you read — which is why there is no cookie banner. A banner here would ask your consent for nothing.

The server that sends you these pages keeps ordinary request logs, which include IP addresses, as every web server does. They are not analysed and nothing is joined to them. There is no mailing list, so there is no address on file.

Outbound links go straight to the publisher, with tracking parameters stripped before the link is rendered. Once you follow one you are on the publisher's site, under the publisher's own terms.

The headlines and the publisher-written summaries are not this site's to license — they belong to the publishers who wrote them, and permission for those has to come from them. What belongs to Daily Kickoff is the selection and arrangement, the summaries written here, and these pages.

Quoting a card with a link back is fine, and always will be. Republishing a whole edition is not. For anything between the two, ask.

Yes: RSS and JSON, carrying the full text of every card. The unit is the edition rather than the card: one item a day, so a reader's unread count stays a number worth looking at.

Nothing is ever held back for the site — a feed here carries what the page carries. There is no email list and no notification of any other kind, so nothing about subscribing puts you on a list.