Why AI Briefings Beat RSS Readers

RSS readers were revolutionary — instead of visiting 50 websites, everything came to you. But they created a new problem: now you had 50 websites worth of content in one place, and still had to read all of it.

The aggregation trap

Tools like Feedly, Inoreader, and even email newsletters solve collection, not comprehension. You still face the same firehose — it's just pointed at your inbox instead of scattered across the web.

The average knowledge worker subscribes to 15+ sources. At 10 minutes per source, that's 2.5 hours of reading before you've done any actual thinking.

Synthesis over summarisation

Most "AI summary" tools give you per-source summaries. That's slightly better, but misses the point. The real value is in cross-source synthesis — finding where sources agree, disagree, or connect in ways you wouldn't notice reading them individually.

When a podcast guest mentions a trend, and a newsletter you read covers the same trend from a different angle, and a blog post contradicts both — that's where insight lives. No single-source summary captures that.

The daily briefing model

Distillation takes a different approach. Instead of summarising each source, it reads everything and produces a single, coherent briefing that weaves your sources together. Patterns, contradictions, and connections — surfaced automatically.

One email. Every morning. At the time you choose.

No app to open. No feed to scroll. No inbox zero to chase. Just the signal, without the noise.