Vibe Feed

About

A tiny client-side news/recommendation feed. RSS sources are fetched in the browser and rendered as a list of cards (title + full text + an LLM summary). There is no backend — everything runs in the browser.

This is a minimal starting scaffold: it runs out of the box, the feed is a chronological list of every source, ranking/dedup is a stub, and the LLM layer uses a mock summarizer by default.

Before the interview

• Pick the AI coding agent / harness you're fastest in (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, …) and have it set up and working. During the session you may use any tools available to you — MCP, plugins, sub-agents, whatever you normally use.
• Clone this repo and make sure it runs locally (see Run it below) — so we don't spend interview time on setup.
• That's it. This repo is just the scaffold — the concrete task will be given at the start of the interview. No need to build anything in advance.

Run it

npm ci      # or: npm install
npm run dev # → http://localhost:5173

You should see a working feed within seconds: a local mock feed (served by the dev server, works offline) plus two CORS-friendly network sources. If the network sources are down, the local mock alone keeps the feed alive.

Stack: Vite + React + TypeScript.

Tests

npm test

A small set of unit tests (Vitest) covering the pure helpers — the mock summarizer and the personalize stub. They're a smoke check, not full coverage; extend them as you build. CI runs build + tests on every push.

Proxy for CORS-less sources

Some interesting RSS/Atom sources (Hacker News, Lobsters, The Verge) don't send CORS headers, so a direct browser fetch fails. A minimal proxy backend fetches them server-side and re-serves them with Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *. It's protected from SSRF by a hostname allowlist — anonymous otherwise, no auth, no caching, no rate limiting (see server/proxy-handler.mjs).

• Dev: nothing to do — npm run dev wires a Vite middleware at same-origin /proxy, so it just works (see feed-proxy plugin in vite.config.ts).
• Standalone: npm run proxy starts a node:http server on http://localhost:8787 (override the port with PORT=...). Needed for production, since GitHub Pages only serves static files — point the built frontend at your deployed proxy via VITE_PROXY_URL at build time. VITE_PROXY_URL replaces the entire proxy base, path included, so the value must end in /proxy (e.g. https://proxy.example.com/proxy, not just https://proxy.example.com).
• vite preview: also served by the same middleware (configurePreviewServer).

To add a new proxied source: add it to FEEDS in src/lib/feeds.ts with viaProxy: true, and add its hostname to ALLOWED_HOSTS in server/proxy-handler.mjs — the two lists are kept in sync by hand.

Files

File	What it is
src/lib/feeds.ts	RSS sources. Heterogeneous on purpose (formats, CORS).
src/lib/rss.ts	Fetch + parse RSS/Atom in the browser. Naive — Promise.all, RSS 2.0 + Atom parser.
src/lib/personalize.ts	Interest model + ranking. Currently a stub that returns the feed unchanged.
src/lib/summarizer.ts	LLM layer behind a narrow summarize() interface. Mock default; WebLLM optional.
src/lib/types.ts	Normalized FeedItem (title, full content, …).
src/App.tsx	UI: cards (title + full text + summary) + an interests placeholder.
public/mock-feed.xml	Local feed with full article text (content:encoded); works offline.
server/proxy-handler.mjs	Pure CORS proxy logic (URL allowlist, fetch, response shaping).
server/proxy.mjs	Standalone node:http server around the handler above (npm run proxy).

Change anything — it's a starting point, not a reference.