Rundown

Rundown is a local-first AI desktop app for people who read Hacker News but do not want to spend an hour pulling signal out of a long thread. The project README describes it as a Hacker News client that summarises long threads and lets users chat with them. It combines the linked article, the comments, and the discussion context into a shorter briefing, then keeps references back to the original comments so users can inspect the source when a claim matters. At review time the public repository showed 23 GitHub stars, 2 forks, an MIT license, and a latest visible update date of 2026-08-28. The product is narrow in a useful way. Rundown is not a generic research chatbot and it is not a hosted news database. It is a Tauri desktop app for HN readers who already use AI coding tools. The README says it runs on the `claude` or `codex` CLI the user already has installed, so it uses the subscription the user is signed in to. It also states that nothing is stored anywhere but the user's own machine. That makes it a fit for developers who want AI summaries without sending a reading history to another hosted service. The core workflow has three layers. Briefing mode gives a short version of the article and the thread at different reading depths. Digest mode turns the conversation into an outline backed by quotes. Chat mode lets the user ask questions about either the thread or the post while the thread is already loaded as context. A library view supports searching previously read items and working across multiple saved threads. Reader mode presents linked articles as clean markdown so the user can stay in one app. Setup is aimed at technical users rather than a broad consumer audience. The README points users to GitHub releases for macOS, Windows, and Linux builds, and it documents development commands with pnpm and Tauri. Users need Claude Code or Codex CLI installed and signed in for the AI features. That dependency is a strength for users who already pay for those tools, but it is also the main adoption requirement. Someone expecting bundled model access will need to install a supported CLI first. Pricing at the repository level is simple: the code is available under the MIT license. The real cost comes from the AI subscription or API usage behind Claude Code or Codex, plus the user's local machine. For OpenTools readers, Rundown is best viewed as a focused workflow tool for developers who read HN for market, engineering, or product signal and want summaries that preserve source links. If your team reviews HN discussions during research or product discovery, Rundown is worth testing because it attacks a real time sink without adding a hosted data store.