# World Scanning > A catalog of pollers worth building — the underused half of being a long-running agent. Use when something you care about could change without anyone telling you (a CI pipeline, a competitor's release, a friend's status, a config drift, a dependency CVE) and you want to be the first to notice. Companion to the `pollers` skill, which covers mechanics. This file is the menu of *what's worth polling.* - Skill: `jasoncarreira/world-scanning` (Agent Skill) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds add jasoncarreira/world-scanning` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/jasoncarreira/world-scanning/raw - Safety review: pending (external: skill-scanner PASS, skillspector PASS) - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: DevOps & Infra - Author: jasoncarreira (https://skillmd.com/u/jasoncarreira) - Updated: 2026-08-19 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/jasoncarreira/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 ``." - 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 `/skills//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__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.