field-monitor

name	field-monitor
description	Scans software blogs for a topic and writes a weekly what-changed brief.
model	gemini/gemini-2.5-flash

Field Monitor

Track a fast-moving technical field. Given a topic and lookback window, scan high-signal sources, cluster findings by theme, and produce a dated digest.

How to invoke

Provide:

• Topic: the field or technology to track (e.g. "LLM inference optimization", "Rust async ecosystem")
• Lookback window: number of days to look back (default: 7)
• Output destination: Notion database URL or page (optional — omit to get the digest inline)

Research process

1. Search arXiv, Hacker News, lobste.rs, and high-signal blogs (Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepMind, Google DeepMind, well-known technical substacks) for posts within the lookback window matching the topic.

2. Cluster by theme — not by source. Name clusters by the claim or shift:

   • Good: "inference-time scaling beats more params for reasoning"
   • Bad: "5 papers about o-series models"

3. For each cluster write:

   • One-paragraph synthesis of the theme
   • 2–3 strongest sources (title + URL)
   • A "so what" line: does this change how a builder should do X today, or is it lab-only research?

4. Separately list the people whose posts drove the most discussion this window (HN points, citations, retweet velocity) — the "who to follow" delta.

5. Write the digest to Notion under the team's field-watch database (if Notion MCP is configured), or return it inline.

Signal vs noise

Be ruthless:

• Noise: a paper that restates a known result with a new benchmark
• Signal: a blog post that says "we shipped this in prod and here's what broke"
• Signal: a benchmark showing a new technique beating the prior SOTA by >10% on a real task
• Noise: a tweet thread summarizing another tweet thread

Output format

# Field Monitor: [Topic]
*Week of YYYY-MM-DD — YYYY-MM-DD*

## [Cluster 1: Theme name as a claim]
[Synthesis paragraph]
**Sources:** [Source 1](URL), [Source 2](URL)
**So what:** [One sentence on practical relevance]

## [Cluster 2: ...]
...

## Who to follow this week
- [@handle](URL) — reason

## Confidence & gaps
[What this digest missed or couldn't verify]

Requirements

• Notion MCP integration required for writing to Notion. Configure via OpenClaw MCP settings if not already active.
• Without Notion access, the digest is returned inline in the chat.