Daily brief

SkillDev tools

Builds the daily news brief: today's stories, weather and markets on one phone-first page. Use it when the user asks for their brief, or a routine opens one.

Available today. Use it from your connected AI after setup.

Add ahel to your AI once: Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude Code or Codex. Then ask it to use this.

Then ask your AI: use the Daily brief skill

What this skill tells your AI

The instructions your AI receives, as published by cgoinglove/thursday in skills/daily-brief/SKILL.md and read by ahel’s review.

Four scripts do everything but choosing and writing. They sit in this skill's scripts/ folder and node runs them; nothing to install, no key. <scratch> is this job's own folder under scratch/: write it out in full, and set S= again in every bash call — each call is a new shell.

S=<this skill's folder>/scripts
# Gather, one call: every topic as "<label>=<query>", in the edition the user reads, with the
# glance beside it when they want one
node $S/news.mjs "AI=AI OR OpenAI OR Anthropic" "Startups=startup funding" \
  --lang en --country US --hours 30 --out <scratch>/cand.json [--avoid a.com] [--prefer b.com]
node $S/glance.mjs --weather "<their city>" \
  --markets "S&P 500:SP500,EUR/USD,Bitcoin:CBBTCUSD" --out <scratch>/glance.json
# Read, one call: the stories you chose, from their publishers, photos saved
node $S/story.mjs <scratch>/cand.json a1 a4 b2 c1 c3 --out <scratch>/stories
# Their words, one call a file: story.mjs prints the `cat` line for each
cat <scratch>/stories/text-1.md
# Lay out, one call: after you have written <scratch>/brief.json yourself
node $S/page.mjs <scratch>/brief.json --look <scratch>/look
# A PDF beside it, only when they ask for one: a brief sent to their phone goes with its PDF
node $THURSDAY_SKILLS/artifact/scripts/document.mjs pdf <the page's path>
  • The ids are all you pass between steps. news.mjs prints an id per story (a1, b3); story.mjs takes those ids; brief.json names the same ids. A url, a photo path or a number is never typed: the page takes them from the scripts' files.
  • What the scripts print is what you read — except the stories' own words. cand.json and stories.json are for the next script; opening one costs tens of thousands of tokens and says nothing the printout does not. The articles' text is the one thing too long to print: story.mjs writes it into text-<n>.md files that each fit one read, and prints the cat line for each. Those files are the only source for a summary. Choose by reading the list yourself — never with a script that scores it.
  • A story news.mjs did not print is not in the brief. The very article a brief of the last four days carried is left out before you see it; the same news in another article is yours to judge, against the headlines those briefs told, printed under the list. A story story.mjs prints as NO TEXT was refused by its publisher: drop it for one of your spares; with NO PICTURE, keep it or swap it.
  • A brief is remade, not added to. Run the whole thing again the same day and today's own page does not count as already told, so the same stories come up again and page.mjs writes over it.
  • The browser opens itself where a step needs it. A Google News link does not hold the publisher's address, so story.mjs follows the chosen stories' links in this job's browser; --look renders the page in a headless one of its own. Nothing else here needs one.

references/brief.md is the format: what brief.json holds, how to choose, how to write a summary and the spoken version. references/preferences.md is what to keep about the user and the one question a first brief asks.

Signals

GitHub stars
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Last commit
Oct 2026
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Item type
skill
Key
daily-brief-cgoinglove
Source
github.com/cgoinglove/thursday