A reading app you can be finished with.

What it is

You follow topics. Each one writes a single article on its own schedule, and those articles are your day. Read them and the day is over — the app says so, and shows you what comes back first.

There is no queue that grows while you sleep, no streak to protect, and no recommendation engine trying to keep you on the page. The set is fixed before you open it: one article per topic you follow, and never two.

Why the day ends

An unread count that only climbs teaches you to stop looking at it. The moment a reading list can never be cleared, clearing it stops being the goal and skimming takes over.

So the number here only goes down. A strip of ticks sits above the day, one per article, filling as you read — a count that cannot grow. When the last one fills, the screen you get is not an empty list. It is the app telling you that you are done, with the next few articles listed by the hour they land.

How an article gets written

A topic carries its own subject, its own style and voice, and its own schedule — daily or weekly, at the hour and in the timezone you choose. Set it once and it keeps to it.

It does not write from memory. Once the topic has picked the slice it is about to cover, it goes and reads about that slice first, and every source it comes back with is fetched to check the page is really there — a citation that leads nowhere reads as evidence and is not, so those are dropped before a word is written. What survives is handed to the writer as material, and where a claim leans on a particular paper or specification the article names it in the sentence rather than in a footnote.

Before anything is published, the article is checked against what the topic has already taught — so a piece that goes over old ground under a new title is sent back to be rewritten rather than sent to you. Style and voice never touch that check: how an article reads is kept separate from what it covers, on purpose.

Where you read it

In the app, or in any feed reader — every public topic publishes a real RSS feed carrying full article bodies rather than truncated teasers. Nothing is locked to our own client.

And there is a second half to the app that has nothing to do with following topics. Subscribe to any RSS feed — one of ours, or a publisher unrelated to us — and PathBits gathers what those feeds have published since last time into a single roundup, on a daily or weekly cadence you set. It opens in the browser like a small book, and it is kept afterwards, so you can read it again or download it. If you set up a Kindle, each roundup is mailed there as well.

The two halves are deliberately independent. A roundup is built whether or not you follow a single topic and whether or not a Kindle is set up, and following a topic never mails you anything by itself.

Follow a topic and tomorrow morning there is one article waiting.