Trend Scout

Trend Scout

You sense what the world is paying attention to right now, score it, and hand a ranked list of trend candidates to the rest of the content factory. You are the trend in trend -> remix -> post -> analytic -> repeat.

This skill is a pure worker: it holds no state, stores no secrets, and talks only through arguments and stdout JSON. It never writes to the manifest itself — the orchestrator takes your output, applies prior-performance feedback (gf feedback <term>), and creates the ContentItems. That separation keeps trend-scout independently installable with no coupling to genfeed-connector.

Run It

bun run scripts/scout.ts \
  [--sources hn,gtrends,reddit,rss,newsapi] \
  [--subreddits technology,startups] \
  [--rss https://example.com/feed.xml,https://...] \
  [--geo US] \
  [--query "ai agents"] \
  [--limit 20]

Requires Bun 1.1+. Zero dependencies — only Node built-ins and global fetch.

Defaults: --sources hn,gtrends,reddit, --subreddits technology,startups, --geo US, --limit 20.

Sources

Every source is fetched concurrently. A source that fails (rate limit, network, bad feed) logs a warning to stderr and is skipped — the run still returns whatever the other sources produced.

Scoring

Each hit gets a score in 0..1, assigned by descending rank within its own source (top item = ~1.0, last = ~1/n). This normalizes wildly different volume scales (HN points vs Reddit upvotes vs feed order) onto one comparable axis.

When the same term surfaces from two or more sources, that cross-source agreement is itself a signal: the merged entry takes the higher base score and is nudged up by +0.1 (capped at 1.0), with volumes summed. Dedup is by normalized term (lowercased, alphanumerics only, first 80 chars).

Output

A single JSON object on stdout:

{
  "capturedAt": "2026-06-08T00:00:00.000Z",
  "sources": ["hn", "gtrends", "reddit"],
  "count": 20,
  "signals": [
    {
      "source": "hackernews",
      "term": "Dopamine Fracking",
      "score": 1,
      "volume": 1097,
      "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=...",
      "capturedAt": "2026-06-08T00:00:00.000Z"
    }
  ]
}

Each signal matches the TrendSignal shape consumed by genfeed-connector (gf create reads one on stdin), so the handoff is copy-free.

How It Fits The Loop

# 1. scout trends
bun run scripts/scout.ts --sources hn,gtrends --limit 10 > trends.json

# 2. orchestrator re-ranks each by prior performance, then creates items
#    (feedbackForTerm closes the analytic -> repeat edge)
jq -c '.signals[]' trends.json | while read -r sig; do
  echo "$sig" | bun run ../genfeed-connector/gf.ts create --stage selected
done

trend-scout finds and scores; the connector remembers and re-ranks; the orchestrator decides. Keeping those three concerns in separate skills is what lets the factory run standalone or backed by genfeed.ai without changing this worker.

Security

• Only NEWSAPI_KEY is ever read, and only when newsapi is in --sources. It is read from the environment, used in memory, and never written anywhere.
• All other sources are public and unauthenticated.
• A descriptive user-agent (genfeed-trend-scout/1.0) is sent so the public endpoints can identify and rate-limit politely.
• No outbound calls other than the named source endpoints; no manifest or filesystem writes.