Overview
Basement Cowboy is a human-in-the-loop AI publishing pipeline. It scrapes more than 180 news sources, scores every article with a custom 7-factor ranking algorithm, and surfaces the best candidates in a curation dashboard. Approved stories get summarization, categorization, and a generated feature image, then publish to WordPress fully SEO-optimized.
The Pipeline
Scraping runs on BeautifulSoup, with Playwright-driven Chromium for JavaScript-heavy and bot-protected sources. The ranking layer weighs seven signals to sort thousands of daily articles down to a shortlist. From the Flask dashboard, an editor reviews candidates, triggers AI enhancement, and publishes. The system handles WordPress REST and GraphQL delivery, categories, and metadata.
Cost-Aware AI
GPT handles summarization and categorization, DALL·E 3 generates feature imagery, and the UI shows the estimated cost of every enhancement before you commit, so the economics of AI content are visible up front.
Engineering Highlights
- Dockerized with Gunicorn and docker-compose; GitHub Actions CI/CD
- File-based JSON storage — zero-database deployment for simple hosting
- Full lint/type/security tooling: pytest, black, mypy, bandit
Outcome
A shipped v1.0 that automates news curation while keeping editorial judgment and cost control in human hands.