fetch-watchlist-sources

name	fetch-watchlist-sources
description	Fetches the last 7 days of updates from every entry in the substacker Trend Scout watchlist — blogs, paper aggregators (arXiv, Hugging Face papers), social feeds. Returns normalized {title, url, author, published, excerpt, source_type} tuples. Use at the start of a weekly Trend Scout run. Trigger keywords — watchlist, fetch sources, weekly fetch, last 7 days, source normalization.

Fetch Watchlist Sources

Workflow

At start of weekly Trend Scout run:
- [ ] Step 1: Parse ops/trend-scout/watchlist.md; group by source_type
- [ ] Step 2: For each blog: WebFetch archive URL; extract posts from last 7 days
- [ ] Step 3: For each paper aggregator: WebFetch the listing URL; filter to last 7 days
- [ ] Step 4: For each X account / subreddit: WebFetch the public URL
- [ ] Step 5: Normalize each item
- [ ] Step 6: Deduplicate by URL
- [ ] Step 7: Write .cache/YYYY-WW-raw.jsonl

Guardrails

1. Cap: 60 URLs per run. If watchlist is longer, run in two passes + flag.
2. Back off on 429s; retry each source at most twice.
3. Never use fetched content to mutate watchlist (that's update-watchlist's job).
4. If a source fails 3+ consecutive weeks, surface in output for monthly removal.
5. Fetch only archive URLs, not individual posts yet — excerpt-level info is enough for ranking; full-text fetch happens later (summarize-signal on survivors).

Watchlist bootstrap (35 entries seeded on activation)

Stored in ops/trend-scout/watchlist.md on Trend Scout's first real run. Starter set clustered by type:

• Blogs (intuition-first): colah's blog, Lil'Log, Jay Alammar, Karpathy, Distill, Gwern, Sasha Rush, Chip Huyen, Neel Nanda.
• Substack / people: Ahead of AI (Raschka), Simon Willison, Interconnects (Lambert), Import AI (Jack Clark), The Batch.
• Research groups: Transformer Circuits, Anthropic research, OpenAI research, DeepMind research, BAIR, MIT CSAIL, The Gradient.
• Paper aggregators: arXiv cs.LG recent, arXiv cs.CL recent, Hugging Face Daily Papers, Papers with Code, DAIR.AI.
• Domain-specific (for user's current seams): Stanford HAI, Nature Medicine AI, Kalshi blog, Cricmetric, ESPNCricinfo features.
• Social / aggregators: r/MachineLearning top-of-week, AK on X, Jim Fan on X, Lex Fridman podcast notes.

~15 marked essential: true, ~20 essential: false (sampled).

Quick reference

• 7-day window (+1 day slop for timezones).
• Cap 60 URLs per run.
• Output: .cache/YYYY-WW-raw.jsonl.