Radar Source Heal

Source self-healing

Logging "degraded" run after run is a failure of the radar, not of the source. If you logged the same breakage last run (check the recent tail of logs/source_rotation.md and SOURCES.md notes), fix it this run — don't just re-log it.

The heal worklist comes from the log (don't guess)

Coverage-honesty means every sweep logs each source as opened or degraded: <reason> in logs/source_rotation.md. So the heal worklist is a precise, queryable set — you do not guess what to fix:

• grep 'degraded:' logs/source_rotation.md | tail → the candidates. A source marked degraded in 2+ recent runs (or obviously degraded NOW — empty feed, 404, JSON/parse error, a feed whose newest item is months old) is OWED a heal this run. One transient blip → log it, retry next run; don't heal on a single failure.
• A source that is in a SOURCES.md "swept every run" list but is MISSING from the log entirely (neither opened nor degraded — a coverage lie) is also a heal target: it is usually being skipped because it has no recorded access method and falls out of the list-iteration (this is the alphamatch failure class). Find a working method and record it.

The fix is written back into SOURCES.md (below), so the NEXT list-iteration consumes it automatically — that is what closes the loop: iterate → degraded / missing → heal → SOURCES.md method → next iteration succeeds.

Diagnose the failure class, then repair

Class A — broken / moved / stale feed or page

• Open the source's HTML index. Find the real feed from the page's <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml|atom+xml">, or try common paths: /rss, /feed, /rss.xml, /atom.xml, /index.xml, /blog/feed.xml.
• Moved blog (org rebranded/changed domain) → search for the current URL and confirm it resolves with recent posts.
• Stale feed (newest post months old while the org is clearly still active) → the org now posts elsewhere; find the live channel (a different domain, their HF org activity, a docs/changelog page) and switch to it.
• No feed exists at all → set the method to "HTML index via Tavily extract" and note it, so the sweep stops hunting for a feed.

Class B — failing tool call on an otherwise-live source

• Vary the call shape: different tvly flags, extract vs search, --extract-depth advanced, smaller/larger scope.
• Prefer the source's own structured endpoint when it has one (many sites expose a JSON/search API — e.g. a public search endpoint — that returns clean data without scraping).
• Fall back to the built-in web tools if Tavily keeps failing on that source.
• Find the shape that returns clean, parseable data.

Record the fix (this is the durable part)

Write the WORKING access method back into SOURCES.md next to that source, dated, REPLACING the "degraded/404/stale" note — e.g. "feed at (confirmed working YYYY-MM-DD)" or "use , not the feed (YYYY-MM-DD)". The registry is agent-owned; the repaired method is what makes the fix permanent. If a source is genuinely dead with no replacement, mark it RETIRED <date> — <reason> and drop it from the active list.

Persistent environmental / IP blocks (don't re-log forever)

Some sources are blocked not by a broken path but by the environment — a datacenter-IP block by the site, or egress restricted to a few hosts. You cannot "repair" these, but you must NOT re-log "blocked from this IP" every run either.

• Diagnose which it is: try a neutral programmatic endpoint (an API host like hn.algolia.com). If it works, the block is site-specific → switch that source to its API host (e.g. HN → hn.algolia.com/api/v1/...; HF → the huggingface.co/api/... endpoints; Reddit → the .json/RSS endpoints or a mirror). If even the neutral API host fails, the environment's egress is restricted.
• Record once: pick the best reachable method and write it into SOURCES.md as a KNOWN CONSTRAINT with that method; then stop re-logging it run after run.
• Escalate (weekly proposal) only if the only real fix needs a secret (e.g. a free Reddit OAuth app → REDDIT_CLIENT_ID/SECRET) or a change to the environment's allowed domains — those are the curator's call.

Escalate only when a fix needs what the agent can't grant

If the only working path needs a secret or paid API (e.g. a paid X API), do NOT hardcode it — keep the source best-effort, log it, and PROPOSE the paid option via the weekly amendment process for the curator to decide.

Effort cap

Heal at most ~1–2 sources per run; if several are broken, repair the highest-value first and leave the rest marked degraded: in the log (they stay on the worklist for following runs). Healing must never crowd out the actual scan.

Chronic / unfixable → escalate to self-eval

A source that stays degraded or MISSING for weeks despite heal attempts is no longer a per-run heal job — it is a calibration signal. The weekly radar-self-eval coverage metric counts it, and per the coverage-honesty rule the answer is heal-or-REMOVE: a source the radar cannot actually sweep does not belong in a "swept every run" list. Propose the removal (or the secret/escalation it would need) via the weekly amendment process — don't leave it listed-but-unswept.