OpenClaw News Assistant: $100 Burned on Sports + Tech Dedupe & Hallucination Fixes
A developer on r/openclaw tried building a personal news assistant to track sports and tech/AI news with OpenClaw. The goal: deduplicate repeated stories, summarize, and deliver a daily briefing. While summarization was easy, several hard problems emerged, ultimately costing ~$100 in API tokens before switching to commercial alternatives like Particle and CuriousCats.
Key Challenges
- Same story across 10+ sources with different headlines — deduplication required custom logic.
- Old stories resurfacing as if new — freshness checking needed.
- Sports rumors treated as confirmed updates — hallucination in summaries.
- AI funding news mixed with old company context — context management failure.
- Merging two similar stories into one incorrect story — hallucinated synthesis.
- Confident summaries even when wrong — verification overhead.
- ~$100 token cost for sports + tech filtering pipeline.
Solutions Attempted
The developer added:
- Stricter prompts with explicit source links
- Caching for deduplication
- Ranking algorithms for relevance
- Second-pass verification checks
- 'What changed since yesterday' diff logic
These helped, but costs remained high.
Alternatives Tried
Particle — useful for multi-perspective views on political stories. CuriousCats — closer to the desired 'brief me on what I care about' model, reducing the need to check multiple sources. Both reduced the 'am I missing something?' anxiety.
The post ends with a call for community solutions on deduplication, ranking, freshness, source trust, and token cost.
📖 Read the full source: r/openclaw
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