I've spent the last few months rebuilding how I investigate with AI, and this is the first month it feels coherent enough to show properly.

The stack

Spotlight

Spotlight goes public with this issue. It's an open-source investigative system for AI agents: start with a lead, get a methodology before the research begins, then run investigation and fact-checking in cycles until something starts to hold.

You stay the editor at every gate. Sensitive cases can run on a local model with the context kept on your machine, sources get captured locally before they become evidence, and strong cases land in your Obsidian vault instead of disappearing into a chat log.

Spotlight You lead the investigation. Spotlight does the research.

Scoutpost

Scoutpost V2 is now in public beta. MuckRock handles the authentication layer, which matters because journalist identity data should not sit with me.

The first version was still built around a human operator sitting in the app and driving everything manually. That was the wrong center of gravity. I rebuilt it for agents first. That's why V2 needed the CLI, MCP, and API.

Journalists can create scouts from their agent, monitor pages, local news, social profiles, and civic sources, and store the resulting units in a system built for verification.

They can also ask their agent to search those units, check what holds, and turn them into briefs or drafts without leaving their preferred workflow.

Navigator

OSINT Navigator is where the tooling lives — I've been building it with Craig and Alexios at Indicator. This week's crawl added nearly 2,000 new tools across 17 OSINT sources. The database is now past 9,500. Your agent can query it via MCP or API, the dataset behind it is open-source on HuggingFace, every source accredited, and Spotlight uses it to find the right tool for the job in front of you.

OSINT Navigator Database 9,500+ OSINT tools — open-source, every source accredited.

Worth your time

Tools

Reality Defender — deepfake detection across audio, video, image, text.

World Monitor — real-time global intelligence dashboard. Conflict data, military flights, maritime tracking, 435+ sources.

VeraCrypt — disk encryption with hidden volumes and plausible deniability.

Junkipedia — monitor misinformation across 15+ platforms. Built by and for investigators.

Visual

Nadieh Bremers Visualizing Neglect for the END Fund — polar column charts that toggle between percentages and absolute numbers, reframing the entire scale. One of the best I've seen this year.

Exit signal

Florent Daudens makes the publisher case: blocking agents is not a strategy. The opportunity is making knowledge queryable inside agent workflows, not protecting static pages and hoping the click comes back.

Francesco Marconi makes the business case from the other side. In his AppliedXL thesis, value is moving from the content layer to the intelligence layer — from selling awareness of what happened to selling the ability to act on information before everyone else can.

That's the shift underneath all of this. The article still matters. But the detection pipeline, the structured record, and the systems that surface signal before it becomes obvious are where pricing power starts to migrate.

The Click Is Dying. What Pays Next? Florent Daudens on why blocking AI isn't the answer.

Who Will Monetize Truth? Francesco Marconi on value moving from content to intelligence.

— Tom