Daily News Watcher

Why This Skill Exists

This package is a Practitioner-facing example of a persistent local workflow.

A "daily news roundup" sounds like something a chat answer can solve, but as soon as you want it to remember your sources, dedupe across days, and keep a history of what it has already shown you, the request stops being a one-shot prompt. It needs state that survives between sessions.

The package demonstrates the shape that pattern takes inside a Codex skill:

• a small SQLite database that persists sources, articles, and runs
• deterministic helpers for fetching, parsing, deduplicating, and summarizing
• readable rule files instead of hidden heuristics
• a Markdown report per run that the user can read or share
• explicit safety boundaries around what the skill is willing to fetch

Who It Is For

This skill is for students, contributors, and operators who want to see what a real Codex-compatible local workflow looks like when persistence matters.

It is most useful for requests such as:

• track a handful of named publications over time
• pull the last 24 hours of AI news into a single Markdown digest
• keep a personal newsroom that does not silently re-show old articles
• learn how SQLite, deterministic scripts, and agent reasoning fit together

End-to-End Workflow

The workflow is intentionally split into two user intents:

1. Add sources. The user names publications they want to track. The skill resolves names to feed URLs (using a small known-sources table), validates each URL, and inserts it into the local database.
2. Fetch and summarize. The user asks for a digest with a topic and a time window. The skill fetches each source, parses RSS or Atom (with an optional Playwright fallback for pages without feeds), deduplicates by canonical URL and content hash, applies the topic and time filters, writes a Markdown report, and stamps the run in the database.

The agent is expected to rewrite the deterministic snippets into readable prose in its final reply. The script supplies the data scaffolding; the model supplies the language.

What The Package Actually Does

• Stores sources, articles, and runs in ~/.codex/state/daily-news-watcher/news.sqlite.
• Fetches feeds with stdlib urllib and parses them with xml.etree. If the optional feedparser package is installed, it is used automatically. If playwright is installed and --use-playwright is passed, it is used as a fallback for non-feed pages.
• Canonicalizes URLs (strips utm_*, gclid, etc.) and computes a SHA-256 content hash so the same article does not appear in two reports.
• Writes a Markdown report per run under reports/daily-news/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>.md.

What It Does Not Do

This package does not:

• bypass paywalls, captchas, or login flows
• store cookies, auth headers, or session data
• abort the whole run when one source fails
• send notifications or push to external services in v1

How To Read It In The Handbook

Treat this package as a Practitioner example of a local, persistence-heavy workflow:

• README.md explains the human story and the two-intent workflow
• SKILL.md is the invocation contract for Codex
• scripts/daily_news_watcher.py implements the deterministic helper
• references/known-sources.csv resolves common publication names to URLs
• references/fetch-rules.md documents the safety and behavior rules

If you are a student reading the repo, the main lesson is:

1. some workflows fundamentally need state that outlives a single chat
2. SQLite is enough for that state when the workflow is local-first
3. a good skill package keeps the deterministic pieces (fetching, dedupe, storage) in scripts and lets the agent handle the language work