news-digest

Daily News Digest Automation

Create a cron automation that turns a list of feeds into something worth reading: a few hundred words a day on what happened in the topics you care about, with a link under each item.

It connects to nothing. There is no token to issue, no account to link, no OAuth screen. That makes it the automation to run first - it exercises the schedule, the conversation, the model and the run log end to end while nothing of yours is at stake, and it is useful in its own right afterwards.

The script is deterministic: the schedule, the once-a-day claim, fetching, parsing, the freshness window, and remembering what has already been covered are all Python. The LLM is invoked only for the part that is judgement - reading the shortlist and writing something that is not just the headlines pasted back. When nothing new matches, no conversation is started at all, so a quiet day costs no tokens.

Prerequisites

None. That is the point.

The runtime needs outbound HTTPS to the feed hosts, which it already has if it can reach the model. Nothing is read from Settings -> Secrets, and nothing needs to be added there.

Setup Workflow

Follow these steps in order.

Step 1 - Collect the feeds

Ask: "Which feeds should the digest read? (One RSS or Atom URL per line. Press Enter for a general technology set.)"

Default:

https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
https://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index
https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml

Check each one before accepting it, because a URL that returns a web page rather than a feed is the most common setup mistake:

curl -sSL --max-time 20 -A "OpenHands-News-Digest/1.0" "{feed_url}" \
  | python3 -c "
import sys
from xml.etree import ElementTree
try:
    root = ElementTree.fromstring(sys.stdin.buffer.read())
except ElementTree.ParseError as exc:
    print('ERROR: not valid XML:', exc); raise SystemExit
name = root.tag.rsplit('}', 1)[-1]
items = [e for e in root.iter() if e.tag.rsplit('}', 1)[-1] in ('item', 'entry')]
print(f'OK: <{name}> with {len(items)} entries' if name.lower() in ('rss', 'feed', 'rdf')
      else f'ERROR: root element is <{name}>, which is not a feed')
"