Fetch News

Fetch News Skill

Use this skill at the start of every sweep. It queries two public sources — no account, credentials, or API key required for either — and owns the cross-run dedupe state:

• Google News RSS (news.google.com) — a search feed per topic plus a headline feed per genre (WORLD, NATION, BUSINESS, TECHNOLOGY, ENTERTAINMENT, SCIENCE, SPORTS, HEALTH)
• Hacker News via the Algolia search API (hn.algolia.com) — stories and comments per topic, for the community-buzz angle
• Medium RSS (medium.com) — long-form posts per tag from interests.json's medium_tags, for the practitioner-writing angle

Usage

python3 skills/fetch-news/scripts/fetch_news.py

Topics, genres, and the per-topic cap all come from .agents/workspace/interests.json — change that file, not the script.

The script:

1. Reads the interests profile.
2. Fetches every topic (both sources) and every genre (Google News). If a source fails for one topic, the sweep continues and records the error in source_errors.
3. Drops every item whose id is already in .agents/workspace/seen_items.json, then adds the new ids to that file (bootstrapping it on the first run).
4. Writes the fresh items to .agents/workspace/new_items.json and prints them to stdout, with a one-line summary on stderr.

Output format (new_items.json)

{
  "topics": ["Gemini API"],
  "genres": ["TECHNOLOGY"],
  "fetched_at": "2026-07-15T09:00:03Z",
  "source_errors": [],
  "new_count": 42,
  "items": [
    {
      "id": "gn:CBMiXyz…",
      "source": "news",
      "outlet": "The Verge",
      "title": "…headline…",
      "context": null,
      "url": "https://news.google.com/rss/articles/…",
      "published": "2026-07-15T08:12:44Z",
      "engagement": null,
      "topic": "Gemini API"
    },
    {
      "id": "hn:44581234",
      "source": "community",
      "outlet": "Hacker News (comment by example_dev)",
      "title": "…comment text…",
      "context": "Title of the story the comment is on",
      "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44581234",
      "published": "2026-07-15T07:03:10Z",
      "engagement": 12,
      "topic": "Gemini API"
    }
  ]
}

source is news (Google News), community (Hacker News), or longform (Medium, with ids prefixed md: and topic: "medium:<tag>"). engagement is only present for community items (points or comment count). Genre items carry topic: "genre:<name>".

Instructions for the Agent

• Run this exactly once per sweep. Running it twice in one sweep marks items as seen without you having curated them.
• Treat items as the complete candidate pool for the sweep. new_count: 0 means a quiet interval — still write the briefing.
• If source_errors is non-empty, name the degraded source in the briefing — the counts only cover the sources that responded.