Scour - August Update

* 01 Sep, 2026 * Hi friends, In August, Scour scoured **878,974 articles** from **28,519 feeds**\. Also, 219 users signed up since my last product update email at the end of June so welcome to you all\! *If you've been enjoying Scour and would be willing to put a quote on the testimonials section of the [home page](https://scour.ing/about), please let me know\!* Here's what's new in the product from July and August: ## 📊 More of What You Like I've spent a lot of the past 2 months working on improving ranking quality\. Now, the interests and sources you tend to click on and like get boosted while those that you tend to ignore or dislike are deprioritized\. Additionally, Scour got a notch better at matching posts to your interests, so you should see less off-topic content\. *By the way: liking and disliking items you read on Scour helps make your feed better and also helps me figure out what types of ranking changes to prioritize\.* ## 📅 Detecting Event Coverage Scour now detects groups of articles covering the same event, including across days and even when they don't all link to a common source\. You should now see less repeat coverage of the same major news stories across days\. ## 🚮 Suppressing Junk Scour is better at detecting and hiding ads, deals, press releases, sponsored placements, listicles, and posts with little substantive content\. Also, arXiv papers that have been withdrawn by their authors won't show up in your feed\. ## 💅 Sleeker Feed Interface I got a little excited after adding some of the features in June and the feed got a little too busy\. Now, the feed has been cleaned up again\. While scanning the feed, you'll see just the information you need to decide whether to click on it\. You can tap any row to see additional information including a preview snippet from the post and other articles that cover it or that it links to\. Plus, after you love, like, or dislike a post, you'll see additional options for seeing more or less content like that in your feed\. ## ⏱️ Reading Time Under each post's title, you'll see the estimated reading time, as long as Scour was able to fetch enough of the article's content to determine the length\. ## 📝 Easier Interest Adding Adding new interests got easier\. You can write any free-form text you want\. While you're typing, you'll see \"quick add\" suggestions based on topics other users have added\. Or, when you click Add Interests, Scour will extract appropriate topics from whatever you have written\. ## ∞ Feed Keeps Going If you run out of posts from feeds you subscribe to within the given time window, your feed will now continue automatically to show you slightly older posts and then posts from across all of Scour\. --- ## 🔖 Some of My Favorite Posts Here were some of [my favorite articles](https://scour.ing/@emschwartz/likes) I found on Scour in July and August: - As I've continued to [read and think](https://emschwartz.me/notes-from-the-ai-coding-transition/) about how we use AI, particularly in software engineering, these were some I found interesting: - Nolan Frausto wrote about [The AI Slop Spiral](https://scour.ing/@emschwartz/p/https:%2F%2Fnolanfrausto.com%2Fposts%2Fai-slop-spiral%2F) and teams getting into the habit of having AI write plans that are so long and give the appearance of thinking, which are then only reviewed by AI, and then used to have AI produce code, which is then only reviewed by AI, etc\. - Patrick George Wyndham Smith wonders about how we should think about code review in [Faster pull requests are faster horses](https://scour.ing/@emschwartz/p/https:%2F%2Froyalicing.com%2F2026%2Ffaster-pull-requests-faster-horses)\. He makes the point that \"Reading code only as diffs is like trying to view an elephant through a straw\.\" - Geoffrey Litt wrote [Understanding is the new bottleneck](https://scour.ing/@emschwartz/p/https:%2F%2Fwww.geoffreylitt.com%2F2026%2F07%2F02%2Funderstanding-is-the-new-bottleneck), which contains a thesis I very much agree with and an `/explain-diff` skill that I tried out for a few days and then turned off\. - Alex Klos wrote [How Do We Stop Vibe Coding?](https://scour.ing/@emschwartz/p/https:%2F%2Faklos.substack.com%2Fp%2Fhow-do-we-stop-vibe-coding) discussing how to build trust with AI-generated code and the dissatisfying array of options for spec-driven development\. - Ariana Irady wrote [The Instagram Rebrand and How Typography Always Wins the Argument](https://atypeofamigo.com/on-instagrams-rebrand-typography-always-wins-the-argument/)\. - Bradley Emi, co-founder of Pangram, wrote a useful explanation about why LLM-written text is so flat, boring, and detectable in [LLMs don't just mimic human text](https://scour.ing/@emschwartz/p/https:%2F%2Fpangram.substack.com%2Fp%2Fno-llms-dont-just-mimic-human-text)\. - Irene Zhang of ChinaTalk wrote about the motivations of the DeepSeek founder, Liang Wenfeng, in [The DeepSeek Thesis](https://scour.ing/@emschwartz/p/https:%2F%2Fwww.chinatalk.media%2Fp%2Fthe-deepseek-thesis)\. --- Happy Scouring\! - Evan [\#scour](https://emschwartz.me/blog/?q=scour)