hn-brief

hn-brief is a skill for Claude Code from ArchitektApx/HackerNews-Brief. It costs 63 tokens per session (2,161 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A personalised digest of Hacker News, a website where developers share and discuss technology articles and projects. It ranks stories using an interest profile that changes based on what you open.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for daily or time-range-based Hacker News summaries, discovering topics, and managing the subjects included in your brief.
Why use it?
It reduces the time spent scanning many Hacker News posts for topics you care about. You can also adjust, explore, or review the interests used for ranking.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT} variable.

Runs only inside its plugin — its command needs a path that Claude Code sets for a plugin’s own hooks and for nothing else. Install the plugin, not this.

Part of the hn-brief plugin — 1 skill shipped together

Good fit Use it for daily or time-range-based Hacker News summaries, discovering topics, and managing the subjects included in your brief.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add ArchitektApx/HackerNews-Brief
Claude Code
/plugin install hn-brief

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install hn-brief, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill.

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.

agentmods badge for hn-brief

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/architektapx/hackernews-brief/hn-brief/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/architektapx/hackernews-brief/hn-brief)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/architektapx/hackernews-brief/hn-brief"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/architektapx/hackernews-brief/hn-brief/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for hn-brief

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/architektapx/hackernews-brief/hn-brief"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/architektapx/hackernews-brief/hn-brief.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 63 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,161 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00063 $0.02161
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.01081
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00432
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00216

Measured 9d ago against content hash 8ab338f10c70, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

hn-brief 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 9d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 5 executable files (scripts/extract.py, scripts/fetch.py, scripts/hn.py, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

skills/hn-brief/SKILL.md · 174 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 174 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

hn-brief

REF=${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/hn-brief/reference

hn-brief is on the Bash tool's PATH and is the only command to run. Write it bare, one invocation per Bash call: no path, no python3, no second statement. Any other shape makes the user re-approve almost every run. Never edit the profile JSON by hand.

Routing

The argument picks the mode, and natural phrasing maps to the same routes ("what's on HN", "stop showing me crypto", "I like number 4"). Read a reference file only for the mode invoked.

Argument Action
none Daily brief, below
explore $REF/explore.md, which also takes a range
interests|add|forget|keep|setup $REF/interests.md
tracker|settings $REF/operations.md
anything else A time range such as yesterday or since monday, passed to --range verbatim

Never convert a range to hours yourself. If the script rejects one it prints the grammar it accepts: translate into that once, rerun, and state the reading in a line above the brief. Twice means ask instead.

Daily brief

One Bash call:

hn-brief brief --range "<range or empty>"

It applies pending clicks, ages the profile and prints one payload. Rank from that, it carries the profile, settings and candidates, so nothing else needs querying. If profile.interests is empty, run setup instead.

notices.clicks reports what the user's clicks changed. When something moved, open with one line like Learned since last brief: <topic> +2, new interest <topic>.

notices.tracker gives the port for every link. On "status": "failed" or "remote" there is no tracker: link each title to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=<id>, drop the comments link and every invitation to click, and say once that clicks are not tracked this run, so keep N is the only signal left.

range carries the resolved band and a days multiplier. Title the brief with range.label, plus the resolved dates whenever the range was anything but the default, so a misread phrase is obvious. Scale how many items you show by range.days: a week deserves more than a day's worth, and the candidate caps already scaled.

Read the full file on GitHub · 174 lines

Files

What ships with it

8 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 174 lines · 63 tokens per session scan A 8ab338f10c70

Subscribe to this mod's changes

hn-brief is a skill published in the GitHub repository ArchitektApx/HackerNews-Brief (1 stars, last pushed 23d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 63 tokens to every session and 2,161 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.

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