Weekly Signal Diff

Weekly Signal Diff

Produces a personalized weekly intelligence briefing by tracking companies and categories you care about, diffing against last week's state, and ranking changes by relevance to your specific projects and priorities.

Trigger

Use when the user says "weekly signal diff", "what changed this week", "signal diff", "weekly intelligence", "what should I know this week", "run the weekly scan", or when invoked as a scheduled task.

Phase 1: Load Context

1. User context -- read vault/CLAUDE.md or project manifests to understand:

   • Active projects and their domains
   • Current priorities and deadlines
   • Technology stack in use
   • Business interests (clients, markets, verticals)

2. Tracking list -- check for a persisted tracking list at ~/.claude/signal-diff/tracking.json. If it doesn't exist, build one from user context:

   {
     "companies": ["Anthropic", "Google", "OpenAI", "Apple", "Microsoft"],
     "categories": ["AI infrastructure", "developer tools", "agent frameworks", "pricing models"],
     "keywords": ["MCP", "agent SDK", "inference cost", "per-seat pricing"],
     "last_run": null,
     "history": []
   }
   

   Ask the user to confirm or modify before first run.

3. Previous state -- load last week's analysis from ~/.claude/signal-diff/history/ if available.

Phase 2: Signal Gathering

For each tracked company and category, search for developments since last_run (default: 7 days):

1. WebSearch for each company: "[company] news announcement [this week]"
2. WebSearch for each category: "[category] developments [this week]"
3. WebSearch for each keyword: "[keyword] update release change [this week]"

Deduplicate results. For each signal, capture:

• Headline
• Source
• Date
• Company/actor
• Category
• 1-sentence summary

Target: 20-40 raw signals before filtering.

Phase 3: Relevance Scoring

Score each signal 1-10 on relevance to the user's context:

Weighted score = (project * 3) + (strategic * 2) + (action * 2) + (knowledge * 1) + (novelty * 1)

Filter to top 10-15 signals.

Phase 4: Diff Against Last Week

If previous state exists, compute the diff:

• New signals -- things that appeared this week that weren't on the radar
• Escalated signals -- ongoing trends that got more significant
• Resolved signals -- things from last week that concluded or became irrelevant
• Steady state -- ongoing items with no material change (mention briefly, don't detail)

If no previous state, skip this phase and note "First run -- no diff available."

Phase 5: Personalized Analysis

For each of the top 5 signals, write a brief analysis:

[Signal Title]

What happened: [1-2 sentences] Why it matters to you: [Specific connection to user's projects/priorities] Suggested action: [Concrete next step, or "Monitor" if no action needed] Confidence: [High/Medium/Low -- how certain is the relevance assessment]

Phase 6: Output & Persist

Output Format

# Weekly Signal Diff: [Date Range]

## TL;DR
[3 bullet points: the 3 most important things this week]

## Top Signals (Ranked by Relevance)
[Phase 5 analysis for top 5]

## Other Notable Signals
[1-line summaries of signals #6-15]

## Diff vs. Last Week
[Phase 4 diff summary]

## Tracking List Changes
[Any companies/categories that should be added or removed based on this week's signals]

Persist State

Save current analysis to ~/.claude/signal-diff/history/[date].json:

{
  "date": "2026-04-14",
  "signals": [...],
  "top_5": [...],
  "tracking_list_at_time": {...}
}

Update tracking.json with last_run date and any tracking list modifications the user approved.

Composability

• Input from: WebSearch, vault notes, research-agent output, Nate's newsletter digests
• Output to: the social agent content pipeline (signal-to-post), strategic planning, News Narrative Decomposer (for deeper structural analysis)
• Scheduled: Designed to run weekly as a scheduled task. Recommended: Sunday evening or Monday morning.

Notes

• First run requires user confirmation of tracking list. Subsequent runs are autonomous.
• Signal compounding: each week's analysis builds on the last. After 4+ weeks, trend detection becomes meaningful.
• If Perplexity Sonar is available (via OpenRouter or direct API), use it for deeper signal gathering. Fall back to WebSearch if not.
• Keep the tracking list under 20 companies and 10 categories to avoid noise.

Source

Extracted from Nate Kadlac newsletter (2026-04-14) -- "Open Brain" concept: personalized signal tracking that re-ranks industry developments using your specific context, producing a structural diff that compounds over time.