A setup command for Herald's daily news digest pipeline. A news pipeline collects articles from sources, stores them, and prepares them for reading.

Use it to initialise Herald and configure feeds or Hacker News integration for topics such as AI, Rust, DevOps, or security.

It creates the initial configuration and helps choose sources based on the topics you follow.

news-init — Command for Claude Code by heurema: A setup command for Herald's daily news digest pipeline.

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods

npx agentmods add commands/heurema/herald/news-init

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/heurema/herald

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install herald, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill, 7 commands, 1 hook.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/heurema/herald/news-init.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/commands/heurema/herald/news-init)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/commands/heurema/herald/news-init"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/heurema/herald/news-init.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Per session 9 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.

When invoked 519 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00009	$0.00519
Opus 5	$0.00005	$0.00260
Sonnet 5	$0.00002	$0.00104
Haiku 4.5	$0.00001	$0.00052

Measured 5d ago against content hash e9912792937c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

news-init scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 5d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

commands/news-init.md · 53 lines

What it actually says

You are setting up the herald v2 daily news digest pipeline.

Steps

Check if already set up: Find the herald data directory by running:
```
cd "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}" && PYTHONPATH=. python3 -c "from herald.cli import _default_data_dir; print(_default_data_dir())"
```
Check if config.yaml exists in that directory (defaults to ~/.local/share/herald/; falls back to ~/.herald/ for legacy installs; override with --data-dir or HERALD_DATA_DIR).
- If it exists: tell user setup is done, offer to show status (/news-status) or run pipeline (/news-run).
Run init:

cd "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}" && PYTHONPATH=. python3 -m herald.cli init

Configure sources: Read config.yaml from the herald data directory (see step 1) and help user add sources:
- Ask: "What topics do you follow? (e.g., AI, Rust, DevOps, security)"
- Based on answer, suggest sources with RSS feeds and HN integration
- Edit the resolved data dir path config.yaml (from step 1) to add sources using this format:
```
sources:
  - id: hn
    name: Hacker News
    weight: 0.3
    category: community
  - id: simonw
    name: Simon Willison
    url: https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/
    weight: 0.2
```
- For HN source, add hn adapter mapping (handled by pipeline)
- Optionally configure topics for keyword filtering
Run first collection:

cd "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}" && PYTHONPATH=. python3 -m herald.cli run

Show results: Report articles collected and stories created.
Privacy note: "All data stays local in your herald data directory (~/.local/share/herald/ by default). No paid API keys required. RSS feeds are fetched directly."
Next step: "Run /news-digest to read today's digest."

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

5d ago First seen · 53 lines · 9 tokens per session scan A e9912792937c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

news-init is a command published in the GitHub repository heurema/herald (4 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 9 tokens to every session and 519 once invoked, about $0.0000 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

ai-agent anthropic claude claude-code claude-code-plugin news-digest

news-init

Getting it into your agent

Wrote this? Show the measurements

What it costs to keep this loaded

Grade A, and why

Nothing flagged

What it actually says

Steps

What this file has done since we first saw it

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