At some point, I gave in.
Not in a dramatic way, and not all at once. It was more of a gradual shift in how I was thinking about what came next. AI wasn't just something people were experimenting with anymore. It was showing up everywhere, tools, workflows, products, even job expectations. It felt like another industry shift, the kind that changes what matters and what doesn't, except this one was moving faster and with a lot less clarity.
There was a constant message underneath it all, whether people said it directly or not. If you don't keep up, you get left behind. I didn't know if that was entirely true, but it felt real enough to act on. Especially where I was at the time. No job lined up, trying to make something work on my own, watching everything change again while I was still trying to stabilize. It didn't feel like something I could ignore, so I leaned into it.
That's where NewsBeacon.ai came from.
The idea itself was straightforward. Local news is fragmented, especially in smaller communities. Updates come from all over the place, small publishers, blogs, city pages, school updates, police reports. If you want to stay informed, you end up checking multiple sources and hoping you didn't miss something important.
I wanted to simplify that, so I built something that could gather those sources, filter them by county, and present them in one place. Something simple, something useful, something that felt like a community tool instead of another content platform trying to keep people on the page.
That part made sense, but the part that changed everything was how it worked. Instead of just collecting links, I built an AI-driven pipeline behind it, a kind of automated workforce that could scan sources, extract updates, generate short summaries, and organize everything into something readable. It was efficient, scalable, and aligned with where everything else seemed to be going.
On paper, it looked right. In practice, it was more complicated. I had to be careful in a way I hadn't been before, not just technically, but legally and ethically. Every detail mattered, what content was being pulled, how much of it was shown, how summaries were written, how clearly the original source was credited. I made sure everything linked back, kept summaries short, and labeled them clearly so there was no confusion about ownership. The intent was always to support the original publisher, not replace them.
News Beacon was built as a community utility, a way to discover what was happening locally, scan a quick preview, and then go to the source for the full story. It was meant to increase visibility, not compete with it, but intent doesn't always matter as much as perception.
Some publishers didn't see it as helpful. They saw something closer to scraping, something that sat too close to their content, even if the implementation was careful. And if I'm being honest, I can understand that. Local journalism is already under pressure, and control over content matters. Seeing something automated interacting with that space isn't going to feel neutral.
That led to conversations that weren't always simple. Some were reasonable, some were tense, and some felt like I was explaining the same thing over and over again, that I wasn't trying to take anything, just organize it and point people back to it. But once something enters that kind of gray area, it doesn't stay straightforward.
There's a legal side to it that isn't clearly defined. It depends on interpretation as much as implementation, and that uncertainty carried a different kind of stress than anything I had worked on before. With Pip-Boy, I had been careful about IP, but it was clear what I was building. Tools, simulations, no assets, no confusion. This felt different, like walking a line that wasn't clearly marked.
At the same time, I kept building because part of me still believed in the idea. The problem was real, and the solution made sense. But there was another part of me that didn't feel right about it. There's something about AI-generated content, even when it's useful, that people push back on. It feels distant, automated in a way that doesn't sit right, especially when it touches something like news.
And I didn't completely disagree. I could see both sides at the same time. It was useful, but it was also uncomfortable, and that tension never really went away. It just sat there in the background while I kept working on it.
At the same time, it pulled my focus. Time that could have gone into Pip-Boy, into the community, or into finding a job was now going into this, building it, adjusting it, explaining it, navigating concerns around it. And unlike Pip-Boy, it didn't give the same kind of return. It didn't grow the same way, didn't connect the same way, didn't feel the same way. It just existed, and eventually, that became hard to ignore.
Looking back, I don't think building News Beacon was a mistake, but it did show me something I hadn't really considered before. Not everything that makes sense to build is something you should build, and not everything that helps you keep up actually moves you forward.
AI can be powerful. It can solve real problems and accelerate things in ways that weren't possible before. But it can also pull you into building things that don't feel like yours, things that align with where everything is going but not with why you started building in the first place.
And that's a different kind of cost.
At the time, I was trying to adapt, trying to stay relevant, trying to find something that worked. But in doing that, I drifted away from what I had already built, away from what was actually working, away from the thing people had already shown up for.
And that's the part that stuck with me. It wasn't a failure. It was a distraction. And that's harder to recognize when you're in the middle of it.