Two weeks ago I wrote about GRIST, a pipeline that read RSS feeds, filtered what was worth reading, and handed me structured raw material to write from.
It worked. I used it. I rewrote it from scratch.
GRIST was a 2024 solution to a 2026 problem.
It had npm run harvest, npm run board, npm run compose. A config file. Its own API key. Prompts you’d manually edit whenever you wanted to tweak behavior. Lots of terminal. Not much conversation.
It worked because I wrote every line. Anyone else would have quit at step three of the setup.
But the problem wasn’t just installation friction. It was that I was building the wrong way — stacking scripts when what already existed was an agent.
In 2026, you don’t need to build an LLM pipeline from scratch anymore. You don’t need to manage context by hand. You don’t need to call APIs directly, write a CLI for every feature, or edit a prompt every time your intent changes.
You have tool calling. You have MCP. You have an agent that already understands what you want and orchestrates the rest.
Quillby is GRIST rewritten for that world.
Instead of a script, it’s an MCP server. Instead of the terminal, you talk to Claude. Instead of editing config files, you have a conversation. The tool itself — fetching feeds, filtering, ranking, drafting in your style — stayed the same. What changed was everything around it.
The part that surprised me most was realizing how much the model already knows how to do when you stop trying to control everything.
GRIST had a filter called Librarian, a prompt I’d calibrate to reject empty listicles, depth-free hype, ads disguised as content. It worked, but it was brittle. Any change in intent meant opening the file, editing, testing, hoping.
In Quillby, you describe what you want once — profile, niche, tone — and the model makes the judgment. Librarian still exists. It just lives in the agent now, not in your text editor.
The result is something I can show someone with no training.
You download the installer, open Claude, and say “set me up with Quillby.” Three minutes. Done. No terminal open on the side. No JSON in hand. No documentation tab.
That’s not nothing. It’s the difference between a tool and a well-documented personal project.
Still at v0.3.4. Still has things breaking. Still has drafts that come out generic when they shouldn’t.
But it’s in use. I use it. And now other people can use it too, without asking me for help.
Sometimes that’s enough to call it progress.