brief

A weekly digest of what changed in React and Next.js — brief.ilkerbalcilar.com

I wanted to keep up with these two repos without scrolling GitHub every few days, and release notes were not enough: React ships releases rarely, so a release-driven digest says "nothing new" for weeks while dozens of meaningful commits land. This reads the commit history instead.

Every Tuesday it pulls the last seven days of commits, drops the noise, has a model pick out what mattered, and builds a static site. The pages are in Turkish; everything else is in English.

How it works

commits     GitHub API — previous Tuesday 00:00 → this Tuesday 00:00 (UTC+3)
   ↓
filter      drops canary bumps, chore/docs/test/ci, dependabot, React sync commits and
   ↓         flake fixes; deduplicates repeated PR numbers
triage      ~110 titles in, the 9 most notable changes plus themes out
   ↓
enrich      PR body and changed-file list for the picked pull requests
   ↓
draft       per change: what it does, and what it means in practice
   ↓
publish     weeks/<week>.json + index.json → DigitalOcean Spaces
   ↓
next build  reads the published JSON over HTTPS, static export → out/

Model output lives as JSON in a Spaces bucket, and the pages are generated from it. Changing the design later means re-running next build, not paying for inference again.

The split is deliberate: publishing needs write credentials, but the objects are public-read, so next build fetches them over plain HTTPS with no credentials at all.

Commands

bun install

bun run generate -- --dry-run    # fetch and filter only, no model calls
bun run generate                 # full run for the current week → publishes to Spaces
bun run generate -- --since=2026-07-20T21:00:00Z --until=2026-07-27T21:00:00Z --week=2026-07-28

bun run dev                      # preview the pages locally
bun run build                    # static export → out/

bun test
bun run lint
bun run type-check

--dry-run is the fast loop for tuning the noise filter: it shows what survived without spending a token.

Environment

Variable	Needed for	Notes
DO_INFERENCE_API_KEY	model calls	DigitalOcean Gradient model access key
DO_INFERENCE_BASE_URL	model calls	defaults to https://inference.do-ai.run/v1
GITHUB_TOKEN	GitHub API	optional locally; without it you get 60 requests/hour
BRIEF_TRIAGE_MODEL	model calls	defaults to router:software-engineering
BRIEF_DRAFT_MODEL	model calls	defaults to router:writing
BRIEF_LANGUAGE	model calls	output language, defaults to Turkish
SPACES_KEY	publishing	Spaces access key, scoped to the bucket
SPACES_SECRET	publishing	Spaces secret key
SPACES_BUCKET	both	defaults to brief-weekly
SPACES_REGION	both	defaults to fra1

Deployment

Two workflows, and only one of them costs anything.

deploy.yml is the whole deployment: it checks the code, runs next build against whatever is already in Spaces, and rsyncs out/ to the box where Caddy serves it. It runs on every push to main, so a code change ships without regenerating a brief. Pull requests get the checks and stop there. No container, no app server — just files.

weekly.yml publishes that week's JSON to Spaces and then calls deploy.yml to render and ship it. The build always happens on a runner, never on the box, which has under 300 MB of RAM to spare.

The workflow has no schedule trigger. GitHub disables scheduled workflows after 60 days without a commit and this repository can go quiet for longer than that, so the timer lives on the server instead: a Cronicle event (brief weekly, Tuesdays 09:00 Europe/Istanbul, dashboard at cron.webgooh.tech) runs an inline shell step that hits the workflow-dispatch API. The fine-grained PAT lives encrypted in Cronicle's secret store (global scope, exposed to jobs as BRIEF_GH_TOKEN) and has actions: write on this repository only; the event retries twice and its run history shows the failure when the PAT eventually expires.

Nothing is committed back to the repository.

Repository secrets: DO_INFERENCE_API_KEY, SPACES_KEY, SPACES_SECRET, DEPLOY_SSH_KEY, DEPLOY_HOST, DEPLOY_USER. They are not edited here: Infisical (project brief-site, prod environment) is the source of truth and a secret sync pushes changes to this repository's Actions secrets automatically.

Adding a repo

One entry in lib/constants/repos.constants.ts:

export const REPOS: RepoConfig[] = [
    { owner: 'facebook', repo: 'react', label: 'react' },
    { owner: 'vercel', repo: 'next.js', label: 'next.js' },
]

Worth checking --dry-run afterwards: every repo has its own commit conventions, and the noise filter is tuned against these two.

Sponsorship

The site runs on a small box and the weekly brief costs a few cents of inference, so this is cheap to keep alive — but not free. If it saves you a scroll through two commit logs every week, you can support it on GitHub Sponsors or Buy Me a Coffee.