| name | daily-news-watcher |
| description | Persistent daily news monitoring backed by local SQLite and Markdown reports. Use when a user asks Codex to track named publications, fetch the last N hours of news, summarize recent articles by topic, deduplicate articles across runs, or maintain a personal newsroom that survives across sessions. |
Daily News Watcher
For a student-facing explanation of why this package exists and how the
end-to-end workflow fits into the handbook, read README.md first. This file
is the invocation contract for Codex.
Overview
Use this skill to operate a persistent personal news watcher. The skill keeps
a list of named sources in SQLite, fetches recent articles from RSS/Atom feeds
(with an optional Playwright fallback for pages without usable feeds),
deduplicates results by canonical URL and content hash, summarizes them, and
writes a Markdown report per run.
The skill has two distinct workflows: add sources and fetch and
summarize. Treat them as separate user intents and surface them as separate
commands.
Safety Rules
- Only register and fetch public sources. Refuse
file://, internal hostnames,
and anything that requires auth headers, cookies, or login flows.
- Never bypass paywalls, captchas, or other access controls.
- Never store browsing credentials, session cookies, or auth tokens.
- One failing source must not abort the whole run. Record the failure on the
runs row and continue with the next source.
- The runtime database, logs, and generated reports live under
~/.codex/state/daily-news-watcher/ and stay out of git unless the user
explicitly asks to commit example artifacts.
- Honor the readable rules in
references/fetch-rules.md.
Workflow A - Add Sources
Trigger when the user names publications to track ("add BBC AI, The Verge AI,
and OpenAI Blog to my daily news watcher").
- For each name, resolve to a URL using
references/known-sources.csv. If
the publication is not known, ask the user for an explicit --url.
- Validate that the URL is a public
http(s) URL.
- Probe reachability with a short HTTP GET. Surface unreachable sources as a
warning but still allow registration if the user insists.
- Insert the source into
sources with tags. Existing rows with the same
name are updated rather than duplicated.
- Echo the resolved URL, type, and tags so the user can confirm.
Workflow B - Fetch And Summarize
Trigger when the user asks for a daily digest ("fetch the last 24 hours of AI
news").
- Read all rows from
sources.
- For each source, fetch via RSS/Atom first. If the response is not a feed
and
--use-playwright is set, fall back to a Playwright render.
- Normalize each article (canonical URL, stripped HTML summary, parsed
published_at) and skip duplicates by URL or content hash.
- Apply
--hours and --topic filters.
- Insert kept articles into
articles and stamp the source with
last_checked_at.
- Write a Markdown report to
~/.codex/state/daily-news-watcher/reports/daily-news/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>.md
that lists sources checked, articles included, summaries, links, and any
skipped or error notes.
- Update the
runs row with finished_at and a status of ok, partial,
all_sources_failed, or no_sources.
Commands
Resolve scripts/daily_news_watcher.py relative to this skill directory. When
running from an installed Codex copy, that is usually
~/.codex/skills/daily-news-watcher/scripts/daily_news_watcher.py.
Add a known publication:
python3 scripts/daily_news_watcher.py add-source --name "BBC AI"
Add a custom source by URL:
python3 scripts/daily_news_watcher.py add-source \
--name "Example AI Blog" \
--url "https://example.com/feed.xml" \
--tags "AI;research"
List or remove sources:
python3 scripts/daily_news_watcher.py list-sources
python3 scripts/daily_news_watcher.py remove-source --id 3
Fetch the last 24 hours of AI news:
python3 scripts/daily_news_watcher.py fetch --hours 24 --topic AI
Fetch with the optional Playwright fallback enabled:
python3 scripts/daily_news_watcher.py fetch --hours 24 --topic AI --use-playwright
Show recent runs:
python3 scripts/daily_news_watcher.py runs --limit 10
Persistence
The SQLite database lives at:
~/.codex/state/daily-news-watcher/news.sqlite
Schema:
sources(id, name, url, type, tags, created_at, last_checked_at)
articles(id, source_id, title, url, published_at, fetched_at, summary, hash)
runs(id, topic, started_at, finished_at, status)
articles.url and articles.hash are unique, so reruns naturally deduplicate
across sessions.
Outputs
~/.codex/state/daily-news-watcher/
news.sqlite
reports/daily-news/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>.md
logs/<run_id>-fetch.json
Do not commit runtime databases, logs, or reports unless the user explicitly
asks for sample artifacts.
Response Pattern
When reporting fetch results to the user, include:
- run id and status
- number of sources checked, with how many had errors
- number of articles included after dedupe and filtering
- the report path
- a short rewritten summary of the most relevant articles (Codex should
rewrite the deterministic snippets into readable prose)
- any source-level errors that should be retried later
When reporting source-management results, include the resolved URL, the
inferred type, and any reachability warning.
