Gah! I didn't solve my reading backlog, I just moved it...
By Magnus Hultberg • 11 April 2026
Last edited: 11 April 2026
For years I had a Readwise Reader problem. Articles, newsletters, and videos piling up. The kind of backlog that makes you feel vaguely guilty every time you open the app.
So I built Ansible in collaboration with Claude Code. It reads everything I save and generates a short summary with key takeaways: stop reading everything, start triaging. Spend two minutes on a summary, decide if it's worth your full attention, move on. A triage layer between the internet and my brain.
It worked. For a few glorious weeks I read what actually mattered and remembered what I'd read — a novel experience.
Then I opened Ansible last week and stared at a wall of unread summaries. The universe, it turns out, had been taking notes.
Huh.
There's a 150-year-old economics concept for exactly this. Jevons' Paradox, named after Victorian economist William Stanley Jevons, who noticed something counterintuitive about steam engines: as they became more fuel-efficient, Britain consumed more coal, not less. More efficient meant cheaper to run, and cheaper to run meant more people ran them.
It shows up everywhere. Fuel-efficient cars and more miles driven. Faster internet and more bandwidth consumed. And apparently: faster article triage and more articles saved.
By making reading cheaper in time, effort, and cognitive cost, I lowered my threshold for hitting save. Previously: "I'll only save this if I'm going to read it." Now: "I'll save it, Ansible will handle the triage." I didn't solve the backlog. I just moved it one step to the left.
My answer, predictably, was to build something.
Ansible now tracks engagement signals: whether I click through, add a note, rate something interesting. In a few months I'll be able to plot my save rate against my engagement rate and find out empirically whether I'm a Jevons victim or just had a busy spring. Either way, the answer will be uncomfortable.
Ansible is a personal project, currently for my own use. If you're interested in the idea, take a closer look on ansible.hultberg.org.
I build a lot of personal trinkets and tools using Claude Code. To maintain well structured and extensible projects I have created a "project template" that you can find on GitHub. Feel free to take it, use it, extract the nuggets from it, etc. Works really well for me, and if you make it work for you I'd love to hear about it.