Aphorism Bot

Daily aphorisms posted to a Telegram group.

Setup

1. Install dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

2. Create your bot

1. Open Telegram, talk to @BotFather
2. Send /newbot and follow the prompts
3. Copy the API token into config.json -> bot_token (already pre-filled if you gave it to Claude Code)

3. Get the group chat ID

Add your bot to the target group, then send a message in the group. Run this once to find the chat ID:

python -c "import urllib.request,json; r=urllib.request.urlopen('https://api.telegram.org/bot<TOKEN>/getUpdates'); print(json.dumps(json.load(r), indent=2))"

Look for "id" inside "chat" in the output. Paste that negative number as the chat_id in config.json.

4. Edit config.json

{
  "bot_token":          "000:AB123...",
  "chat_id":            "-000...",
  "post_hour":          8,
  "post_minute":        0,
  "timezone":           "America/Los_Angeles",
  "enabled_authors":    [],
  "anthropic_api_key":  "sk-ant-...",
  "request_model":      "claude-haiku-4-5"
}

• post_hour / post_minute: when to post each day (24-hour clock)
• timezone: any pytz timezone string (e.g. UTC, America/New_York)
• enabled_authors: list of author names to include, e.g. ["Oscar Wilde", "Nietzsche"]. Leave as [] to include all authors.
• anthropic_api_key: your Anthropic API key — required only for the /request command.
• request_model: Claude model used by /request (default: claude-haiku-4-5).

5. Run the bot

python aphorism_bot.py

Keep it running (e.g. with screen, tmux, or a system service) so the daily job fires.

Commands

Command	Description
/aphorism	Get a random quote immediately
/authors	List all authors and quote counts
/request <author>	Look up and add quotes from an author via Claude AI
/help	Show help

Adding quotes

Via bot command (easiest):

/request Mary Shelley

The bot calls Claude AI to fetch 10 new quotes and appends them to quotes.json. Running /request again for the same author fetches additional quotes.

Manually: open quotes.json and append new entries following the schema:

{
  "id": 116,
  "author": "Author Name",
  "text": "The quote text goes here.",
  "source": "Title of Work"
}

source can be null if unknown. The bot tracks used quote IDs in used_quotes.json so it cycles through the full pool before repeating.

Timezone reference

Region	Timezone string
UTC	UTC
US Eastern	America/New_York
US Central	America/Chicago
US Mountain	America/Denver
US Pacific	America/Los_Angeles
London	Europe/London
Paris / Berlin	Europe/Paris
Moscow	Europe/Moscow
Tokyo	Asia/Tokyo
Sydney	Australia/Sydney