I vibecoded offlinerss to gain efficiency reading HN & Lobsters’ RSS feeds. It fetches the original feed and emits 2 items per original feed item. It emits one for the article, pumped through a “reader mode” plugin to format it for readability in NetNewsWire, and another for the comments, also reformatted for readability.

To use it, deploy it yourself and choose a secret. It runs on Vercel free tier with everything tuned to a userbase of 1 person per deployment. If you supply the wrong secret, it will 404. But with the right secret your news reader can load the (very heavy) feed from wherever you are in the world.

I enjoyed vibecoding this, back and forth with Claude, tuning it to not overload the free services it uses.

The engineering tradeoffs are myriad. Cache tuning? Jitter? Etags? Reformat comment pages, or shove original markup into the feed? JS in the feed, or pure html5? Claude Code happily runs experiments, provides recommendations, then obliges and builds - all so I can read tech news more efficiently! We truly live in the future.

It was vibecoded. It does its job. If you want to read HN & Lobsters offline, maybe it works for you too!