The Daily Yarn.

The Daily Yarn started as a question: how far can an AI-run product go on its own? The answer turned into a live satirical newspaper for Aotearoa that mostly runs itself.

Here is how it works. A reader spots something silly in their neighbourhood and sends in a photo. The site turns that photo into a full satirical news article, written in the voice of a cast of recurring fake NZ reporters. Margaret writes most of them, and she has opinions. A comment thread of AI locals argues underneath, a shareable social image is generated for every piece, and a fresh front page assembles itself every single morning. It reads like a small-town NZ broadsheet, except instead of council minutes it covers driveway feuds, roundabout-renaming debates and leaf-blower wars.

The interesting engineering is in making it trustworthy and cheap at the same time. Each article costs about five cents to generate. A secondary AI quality-gates every piece before it publishes, so the pipeline can run without a human babysitting it. Web push, OG image generation and a self-serve advertising layer are all built in. The one line that never moves is the satire disclaimer, front and centre, because the entire thing is fabricated for entertainment and has to be unmistakable about it.

The problem it really solves is a demonstration one. It is proof, running in public, that a genuinely autonomous AI content product can be built, kept cheap, kept funny and kept safe, by one person. It has published more than 165 articles, it is warm and active, and it has already done real work as a live, demonstrable AI product in front of an investor. It is the portfolio piece that argues for itself, because you can go and read it right now.