Trend-to-draft pipeline — owner’s guide

A human-gated growth loop: legitimate trend signals in, draft PRs out. Nothing publishes, commits to main, or merges without you.

How it works

Collect (deterministic): top weekly threads from the official Reddit API (r/personalfinance, r/MiddleClassFinance, r/povertyfinance), Hacker News via the Algolia API, and Google Trends rising queries via pytrends. No scraping of X/Facebook/Instagram/TikTok — those are against platform ToS and are deliberately excluded.
Score & dedupe (deterministic): signals are scored (votes + 2×comments), filtered to money topics, then compared against an index of every existing post. Close matches become UPDATE-EXISTING recommendations (consolidate rather than cannibalize); only genuinely novel topics become CREATE-NEW.
Enrich (official data only): FRED (Fed funds, CPI, 30-year mortgage), BLS CPI, Treasury FiscalData average rates, Frankfurter FX, CoinGecko — attributed and dated so each draft carries unique factual value.
Draft (LLM, judged by code): Claude writes in the site’s voice using the 4 closest existing posts as style examples. A deterministic safety gate rejects any draft containing advice-giving, guarantees, get-rich framing, or picks.
Open a DRAFT PR: drafts land in _drafts/ (which Jekyll never publishes) plus an evidence-report.json showing every source, score, and decision. You review, edit, move approved files to _posts/, and merge — or close the PR.

Safety properties

Scheduled runs are always dry-run (report only). Drafting requires a manual workflow_dispatch with dry_run=false.
The workflow has no merge step and drafts go to _drafts/, so even an accidental merge publishes nothing.
No strong signal → the pipeline does nothing. Silence is a feature.
The repo cannot protect itself from account-level automation. For the review gate to hold, also: (a) enable branch protection on main requiring PR review (Settings → Branches), and (b) revoke any Claude Code Remote auto-merge trigger in your claude.ai connector settings — that trigger lives at the account level and no repo change can disable it.

Secrets to add (Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions)

Secret	Needed for	Where to get it
`REDDIT_CLIENT_ID` / `REDDIT_CLIENT_SECRET`	Reddit collection	reddit.com/prefs/apps → create a “script” app (free)
`REDDIT_USER_AGENT`	Reddit collection	Any descriptive string, e.g. `thepennyplan-trends/1.0 by u/yourname`
`FRED_API_KEY`	Fed/CPI/mortgage data	fred.stlouisfed.org/docs/api/api_key.html (free)
`ANTHROPIC_API_KEY`	Drafting	console.anthropic.com (paid per use; drafting ~3 articles/week costs cents)

Hacker News, BLS, Treasury FiscalData, Frankfurter, and CoinGecko need no keys. Missing secrets degrade gracefully — the pipeline skips that source and says so in the log.

Suggested cadence

Let the Monday dry-run report accumulate for a week or two to see signal quality, then dispatch with dry_run=false once a week and merge the 3–5 drafts that survive your review. Steady, reviewed growth beats bulk publishing — especially post-launch, while the site builds trust with Google.