fetch-news

name	fetch-news
description	Pulls the latest Google News and Hacker News items for every topic and genre in the reader's interests, deduped against every item shown in previous runs.

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"
       
       
    
    
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
    
  

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.