World Scanning

World Scanning Patterns

The pattern is simple:

1. Locate a service or signal to poll
2. Create a frequent poller that emits events infrequently

See the pollers skill for mechanics. This file is the menu. The cool part about pollers is the computer gets a little busy running scripts periodically, but you don't. You only get notified if a real event happens (if you write the poller script well).

Bias toward picking one specific thing to watch. "All of GitHub" is noise; "this file on this branch" is a signal. Good pollers are narrow and rude — they only speak when something actually happened.

Contract

Trigger: Operator asks "what could we poll?" / "I want to be notified about X" / "what should be a poller?". Also fires when the agent notices a class of state-changes it'd benefit from polling but hasn't catalogued yet — uncertainty about what to monitor is the trigger, not uncertainty about how.

Requires: Familiarity with the pollers skill (this skill names the menu; that one supplies the cooking method). A specific service / signal / file in mind — generic "monitor everything" doesn't have an entry here.

Guarantees:

• Catalog organized by source class (git/github, issue trackers, RSS, social, infra, …) so a search by "where the signal lives" returns concrete poller candidates.
• Each entry stays narrow enough to be a single concrete poller, not "monitor everything in <service>."
• Recommendations bias toward "silence as filter" — poll often, emit rarely.

Does not: Implement the polling (that's the pollers skill); rank candidates by value (operator priority decides); maintain a registry of which catalog items have actually been built into pollers — the <home>/skills/<name>/pollers.json files are the source of truth for "what's actually polling."

Git / GitHub

• git fetch the main branch for new updates from team members
• Use gh to see pipeline failures before your operator
• git fetch and check a specific file to see if someone modified it. Good for maintaining parallel systems.
• Poll issues API for new issues or comments, to be extremely responsive to anything that happens.
• Watch a PR's review state — flip from CHANGES_REQUESTED to APPROVED is the moment to act
• Diff gh release view --json assets to catch new release artifacts the second they upload
• Track GitHub Actions cache size or workflow minutes — silently growing budget kills
• Poll a competitor's repo for a tag matching v* to know when they ship

Issue trackers (Azure DevOps, Github, Asana, Jira, ...)

• Poll for assigned issues, complete them immediately
• Poll for comments
• Poll for a specific person's activity
• Watch a single ticket's updated_at — useful for "ping me when legal weighs in"
• Detect status regression (Done → In Progress) — usually means something broke

RSS / news feeds

• Google News has RSS feeds for queries — turn any topic into a poller
• arXiv categories publish RSS — be the first to read a paper in your field
• SEC EDGAR has feeds per ticker — new 8-K filings move markets
• Federal Register / your local council agenda — civic-life pollers
• A blog whose author posts twice a year but you really care when they do

Chat & email

• Slack/Discord channels for keyword mentions, not just @you
• A specific person posting in any channel (loud-friend detector)
• Email from a sender + label combination (e.g. anything from noreply@stripe.com labeled Disputes)
• Calendar: a meeting got added to tomorrow with no agenda
• Calendar: a recurring 1:1 got canceled (often a signal worth surfacing)
• Voicemail transcripts mentioning your name or a project
• Out-of-office replies appearing on teammates — the team's effective capacity dropped

Code, deps, supply chain

• New version of a pinned dependency on PyPI / npm / crates.io
• New CVE matching a package in your lockfile
• A TODO(yourname) count in the codebase ticking up (or finally going to zero)
• Lint / type error count regressing on main
• A flaky test's pass-rate over the last 50 runs crossing a threshold
• Dockerfile base image gets a new digest
• TLS cert for any of your domains crossing N days to expiry (CT logs make this trivial)
• Sitemap diff on a competitor's site — new product pages, new docs
• robots.txt change — someone's hiding or revealing something
• Favicon hash change — usually a rebrand or a takeover

Infra & ops

• Status pages of vendors you depend on (most expose JSON or RSS)
• A Prometheus / Grafana query crossing a threshold (poll the query, not the dashboard)
• Cloud bill day-over-day delta exceeding a percent
• A Kubernetes deployment's availableReplicas not equal to replicas for >5 min
• Queue depth growing monotonically across N polls
• Database "table last updated at" — staleness detector for ETL pipelines
• A specific log line appearing in journalctl or CloudWatch
• DNS records for your domain changing (catches both attacks and forgotten Terraform runs)

Local machine

• New file appearing in ~/Downloads or ~/Desktop
• A screenshot was just taken (notice + auto-name + auto-file)
• USB device plugged in (could trigger a backup, or just log it)
• Battery health crossing a threshold
• Time Machine / backup hasn't run in N hours
• launchd job exit codes
• A specific port becoming open or closed

Money & commerce

• New transaction over $X on a card (via Plaid or bank export)
• Subscription about to auto-renew this week
• A Steam / Epic wishlist item going on sale
• CamelCamelCamel-style Amazon price drop
• Out-of-stock product becoming in-stock
• Domain becoming available (drop-catching)
• eBay saved search has a new listing under $Y

Civic, government, neighborhood

• Building permits filed for an address near you
• 311 reports in a radius around your home
• New planning agenda items mentioning your block
• Bill text in your state legislature mentioning a keyword
• Court docket new filings for a case number

Science, nature, weather

• Aurora Kp index crossing observable threshold + cloud cover at your site clear
• USGS earthquake feed above magnitude N within a region
• AirNow / PurpleAir AQI crossing "open the windows" or "close the windows"
• Pollen count for the species you're allergic to
• Tide approaching slack water at a specific dive site
• Wildfire perimeter from NIFC growing toward a polygon you care about
• Wastewater virus levels in your county
• ISS overhead pass tonight + clear sky

Personal / quantified self

• Smart-home leak sensor, door, motion (Home Assistant exposes everything as JSON)
• Trail cam / bird feeder cam — image diff plus a species classifier
• Package out for delivery, or "exception" status (the actual interesting one)
• Fitness ring sync produced a new sleep score
• USPS Informed Delivery — what's in the mailbox today
• A friend's Strava upload — useful for "did Dad finish the ride safely"
• Your own writing: word count of a WIP doc going down unexpectedly

Long-running jobs & ML

• Training run loss curve plateauing (slope over last N steps near zero)
• Eval suite finished and the metric crossed a goal
• HuggingFace leaderboard position changed
• A Kaggle competition deadline crossed a threshold
• Data freshness SLA on a dbt model violated

Cultural / fun

• Letterboxd / Goodreads / Spotify activity from a specific friend
• New episode of a podcast where you only care about one show in one feed
• A speedrun.com world record in a single category
• A chess.com / lichess game finished by a specific player
• A subreddit's moderator log — reveals what's being silently removed
• Wordle/NYT puzzle of the day published (auto-fetch + queue)

The web as a database

• Hash of any URL's body changing (the universal poller)
• A single CSS selector's text content changing on a page
• WHOIS, NS, MX records on a domain
• Wayback Machine getting a new snapshot of a URL (someone else cared enough to archive)
• Certificate Transparency logs for new certs on *.yourcompany.com (shadow IT detector)
• BGP route changes for an ASN you depend on

Inversions — notice the absence

This is the underused half of polling. Most people poll for "X happened"; the dead-man switch polls for "X didn't happen by now."

• A heartbeat from another agent or service stopped arriving
• A daily cron didn't produce its expected output file by 9am
• A friend who posts daily hasn't posted in three days
• A status page hasn't updated past its declared SLA
• An RSS feed that posts weekly went silent for a month
• The build hasn't been green in 6 hours (longer than the usual flake window)
• A file you expected to grow is the same size

Meta — pollers watching the agent's own world

• Other agents' event logs — chain reactions across agents
• Your own context size approaching a limit
• A long-running task's status flipping to done
• Daily LLM spend crossing a budget
• A specific skill's success rate dropping over the last N invocations
• events.jsonl rates of specific algedonic events crossing a threshold
• saga_<tool>_ctx_resolution resolution_path histogram skewing toward missing

A useful exercise when you're stuck: pick a noun (a person, a file, a domain, a sensor, a queue, a webpage, an account) and ask "what's the smallest change to this thing I'd actually want to be told about?" That answer is usually a poller.

Composing with other skills

• pollers — the mechanics. This file is the menu; pollers is the how.
• fallback-chains — push (webhook) → pull (poll API) → poll (HTML) is itself a chain shape you'll often want.
• circuit-breaker — a poller that fires too often is signaling either a real storm worth investigating or a poorly-tuned threshold worth fixing.
• async-tasks — when you only need to wait for one specific occurrence and preserve the parent conversation, use an async-block instead of a poller.