Scoring System

After fetching content from all sources, Horizon uses an AI model to score each item on a 0-10 scale. This determines what appears in the daily summary.

Pipeline

1. Batch processing — Items are scored in batches of 10 with a progress bar. Failed items receive a score of 0.
2. Content preparation — For each item, the content is truncated (800 chars if comments are present, 1000 otherwise) and engagement metrics are assembled from metadata (HN score, Reddit upvote ratio, etc.).
3. AI analysis — The prepared content is sent to the configured AI model (temperature 0.3) with a system prompt defining the scoring criteria.
4. Response parsing — The AI response is parsed as JSON (with fallbacks for code-block-wrapped JSON). Each item gets: ai_score (float), ai_reason (string), ai_summary (string), and ai_tags (list).
5. Retry — Failed AI calls are retried up to 3 times with exponential backoff (2-10 seconds).

Scoring Scale

Score	Tier	Description
9-10	Critical	Major sanctions, export controls, tariff moves, military escalations, diplomatic breakdowns, or market-moving state actions with broad international consequences
7-8	High Value	Important trade, energy, sovereign-finance, industrial-policy, or regional-security developments with clear spillover
5-6	Useful Context	Solid follow-up reporting, regional analysis, or background that helps explain a meaningful foreign-affairs story
3-4	Low Priority	Routine updates, thin commentary, repetitive coverage, or limited-impact developments
0-2	Noise	Off-topic, weakly sourced, propagandistic, or trivial content

Scoring Factors

The AI evaluates each item based on:

• Geoeconomic and strategic significance — relevance to trade, sanctions, industrial policy, energy security, sovereign finance, supply chains, or foreign policy
• Potential spillover — how broadly this could affect regions, alliances, markets, or state behavior
• Quality of writing/presentation — clarity, structure, thoroughness
• Source credibility — whether the reporting appears serious, specific, and well sourced
• Community discussion — insightful comments, diverse viewpoints, substantive debates
• Engagement signals — high upvotes/favorites paired with substantive discussion (not just raw numbers)

Engagement metadata is source-specific: HN provides score and comment count, Reddit provides upvote ratio and comment count.

Filtering

After scoring, items are filtered by filtering.ai_score_threshold (default: 8.0) and sorted by score descending. Only items meeting the threshold appear in the daily summary.

{
  "filtering": {
    "ai_score_threshold": 8.0,
    "time_window_hours": 24
  }
}

Items scoring 9.0 or above are featured in the “Today’s Highlights” section of the summary.

Enrichment

Items that pass the score threshold go through a second AI pass for enrichment (src/ai/enricher.py):

1. Concept extraction — AI identifies 1-3 geoeconomic or international-affairs concepts in the item that may need explanation.
2. Web search — Each concept is searched via DuckDuckGo to gather grounding context.
3. Structured analysis — The item content and search results are sent to AI, which produces:
   • whats_new — what specifically happened or changed
   • why_it_matters — significance and impact
   • key_details — notable policy, trade, financial, or regional details and caveats
   • background — background knowledge for readers without deep domain expertise

These fields are combined into a detailed_summary stored in the item’s metadata and used in the final daily summary.