PathBits
One article per topic, per day

Scroll to the end.
There is one.

PathBits writes one article a day for each topic you follow, and nothing more. When you have read them, the app tells you so — and lists what comes back tomorrow, by the hour. No backlog, no unread count climbing overnight.

Start readingSee how a day is built

Free to read. Follow a topic and tomorrow’s article is waiting.

The unit

Everything hangs off a topic.

Not a course, not a feed, not a newsletter you cannot unsubscribe from. A topic is one subject, with its own voice, its own schedule and its own memory of what it has already taught you.

  • Yours or ours

    Follow as many as you want, or write your own

    A topic is a subject you want written about. Follow what already exists — one, or twenty — and create your own for anything nobody has covered.

  • Daily or weekly

    It publishes on its own clock

    Daily or weekly, at the hour and in the timezone you choose. Set per topic, so a morning read and a Friday long-form can live side by side.

  • Shape and sound

    Style and voice are separate knobs

    Style fixes the shape: length, sections, what an article may not open or close with. Voice fixes how it sounds. Neither one changes what the article covers.

  • Checked

    It knows what it has already taught you

    Every article records what it covered, and a draft going back over ground the topic has already been over is sent back to be rewritten — before it reaches you, rather than three paragraphs in.

  • Sourced

    It reads before it writes

    A topic looks its subject up first, and checks that what it found holds up. So an article stands on something real rather than on whatever the model happened to remember.

  • Optional

    A diagram where a sentence will not do

    Turn diagrams on for a topic and an article may draw a sequence, a flow or a state machine when that explains it better than prose. Most articles still will not need one.

  • Private

    Or nobody sees it but you

    A private topic hides its articles and its feed. Useful when the thing you are learning is your own.

  • Weekly

    A few suggestions each week

    Drawn from the topics you already follow. Dismiss one and it stops being offered.

A day, in order

The work happens while you are not looking.

Nothing here needs you to keep a streak, open a notification or clear a queue. It is all done before you open the app.

  1. Just before

    It looks things up

    The topic picks a slice it has not covered, then goes and reads about it. Every source it comes back with is fetched to check the page is really there — anything the server says does not exist is dropped before a word is written.

  2. The hour you set

    Your topic writes

    In the style and voice the topic carries, naming the paper or the specification where a claim leans on one. Then it checks what it taught against everything the topic has already published, and ground it has been over before does not go out twice.

  3. When it lands

    The day is waiting

    One article for each topic you follow, and no more than one. A strip of ticks above them, filling as you read. It only ever counts down.

  4. When it empties

    The app tells you to stop

    And then lists what comes back first, by the hour it lands, so you know when it is worth returning. Most reading apps have no way to be finished. This one runs out.

A look around

The rest of the app.

Topics, the archive, and the settings that decide when a topic writes — in one short pass.

An example

What one actually reads like.

One mechanism, explained and then finished — opening with the answer so you can decide whether to read the rest.

Why the fridge is the worst place for bread

Stale is not dry. It is the starch inside the crumb settling back into a rigid form — and it does that fastest at about the temperature your fridge is set to.

Seal a loaf so tightly that nothing can evaporate out of it, leave it two days, and it goes stale anyway. Whatever is happening in there, losing water to the room is not it.

Baking is what makes bread soft in the first place. Starch arrives in the flour as tight little granules; heat and water make them swell and unravel into a loose, disordered tangle that holds water and gives under your thumb. That tangle is fresh crumb.

It does not want to stay that way. Left alone, those unravelled molecules gradually find each other again and lock back into ordered, rigid crystals, squeezing water out of the tangle as they go. Nothing has left the loaf — the water is still in there, somewhere less useful, and the crumb around it has gone stiff. Bakers call it retrogradation, and it is the whole of what staling is.

And it is temperature-dependent in a way that is genuinely inconvenient. It runs fastest a little above freezing, which is precisely where a fridge sits, so a loaf on that shelf goes stale in a day in a way it would take three to manage on the counter. Below freezing it very nearly stops, which is why the freezer is fine and the fridge is not. It is also reversible: heat pulls those crystals apart again, which is what a toaster is really doing to yesterday

Read the rest in the app
Where it reaches you

Read it wherever you already read.

A topic feed is a genuine, public RSS feed — the same door an outside publisher comes through. Nothing here is trapped behind our own client.

  • In the app

    The day, then the archive

    Today's set on the front page, everything a topic has ever published on its own. Like or dislike an article and the topic hears about it.

  • In your reader

    A real RSS feed per topic

    Full article bodies, not truncated teasers, at /topics/:slug/feed.xml. Copy the URL from the topic page into NetNewsWire, Feedly, Reeder — whatever you already have open.

  • A separate feature

    In a roundup

    Subscribing to a topic’s feed is also how its articles reach a roundup — the other half of the app, where the feeds you already follow are gathered into one thing to read. That is its own section, and it works on feeds that have never heard of us. Following a topic on its own never mails you anything.

The other half

The reading you already do, in one place.

Not everything worth reading is written here. Subscribe to the feeds you already follow and PathBits collects what is new into a roundup — one thing to read on a schedule, instead of a dozen tabs that never empty.

  • On a cadence

    Everything new, gathered into one thing

    Subscribe to any RSS feed and what publishes after you subscribe is collected — daily or weekly, at the hour you choose — into a single roundup, grouped by source, with a couple of sentences at the top on what the batch is about. Nothing new since last time means nothing is sent.

  • Finding them

    A catalogue, not an empty search box

    Explore lists every feed anyone here subscribes to, the most-followed first, each carrying the feed's own description. Follow one from the list, or paste a URL nobody here has tried yet.

  • Per feed

    Turn one down instead of dropping it

    Each feed has a cap on how much of one roundup it may take up, and a mute that keeps the subscription but leaves it out of the next one. A feed that got loud does not have to become an unsubscribe.

  • Reading it

    It opens in the browser

    A cover, a contents rail that fills as you go, one article at a time, and an end — the same shape as a day. Past roundups stay: read one again, download the file, or send it out a second time.

  • Or on a Kindle

    Mailed as one document

    Set the address, approve our sender with Amazon once, and each roundup also arrives on the device, chaptered by source with the original link on every article. No Kindle is needed for any of the above — and the Kindle can be held on its own without pausing the roundups themselves.

Nothing else is scheduled

Pick a topic. Tomorrow morning there is one article waiting.

Follow one and see what it sends. Follow twelve and your day is twelve articles long — still finite, still done by the time your coffee is.

Start readingRead the FAQ