agent-news

name	agent-news
description	Fetch, parse, and summarize news from machine-readable sources designed for AI agents. Use when the user asks for news, headlines, or current events via structured feeds — RSS/Atom, JSON APIs, or llms.txt-compatible endpoints — without scraping human-facing GUIs.

Agent News Skill

Retrieves news from AI-friendly structured sources (JSON APIs > RSS/Atom > llms.txt). Never scrapes GUI pages when a feed exists.

Usage

python3 _scripts/agent_news.py                        # RSS only (no API key needed)
python3 _scripts/agent_news.py --topic "AI"
python3 _scripts/agent_news.py --sources "BBC,TechCrunch" --limit 20
python3 _scripts/agent_news.py --use-api              # requires NEWS_API_KEY in .env

Source Hierarchy

1. JSON APIs (NewsAPI, GNews, TheNewsAPI) — requires API keys
2. RSS/Atom — BBC, Reuters, NYT, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.
3. llms.txt — emerging machine-readable index standard
4. tophub.today — Chinese news (legacy, via tophub_news.py)

Key Principles

• Only report articles actually returned by the feed (no hallucination)
• Always include outlet name, original URL, and published timestamp
• Cache results locally if running multiple queries (respect rate limits)

Output

Sources/Agent News Digest - YYYY-MM-DD.md