personal-assistant

Build a personal market-and-research assistant: watchlist-driven price/mover briefs from keyless data, a video-transcript ideas fetcher, a reading inbox that files summaries with spoken audio, site link-health monitoring, and a private dashboard. Use when the user wants a daily market brief, a perso

A portable pattern for a personal intelligence system: small scheduled jobs collect keyless data into flat files; a private dashboard (and/or daily digest) surfaces it; everything stays quiet unless something is genuinely significant. Zero personal content ships with this skill — the user supplies their watchlist, sites, and inbox on setup.

Purpose

Give one person (or family/friends, each with their own copy) a calm, always-current briefing layer over their interests: their stocks, their sites, their reading, their media diet. It replaces doomscrolling with a short, trustworthy morning read plus alerts only when thresholds break.

Workflow — setup

1. Lay out directories. The skill assumes a workspace with: briefs/, content-repo/{inbox,notes,audio}, site-health/, news-assistant/. Any paths work — the scripts take --out-dir-style args or documented defaults; update them on install.
2. Create the watchlist. Copy templates/watchlist.md to news-assistant/watchlist.md and fill in real tickers. Sections: ## US stocks, ## Indian stocks (or rename for your markets — brief_engine.py --market takes any label, but the Yahoo fallback logic in the script is US/India-specific; adapt as needed). Share quantities in parentheses are optional and weight significance.
3. Configure sites. Copy templates/sites.json, put real {"slug": "https://..."} entries, point check_links.py --sites-file at it.
4. Run the engines once manually to verify output, then schedule (see references/scheduling-patterns.md and templates/brief-cron.md):
   • brief_engine.py --market <m> — pre-market / hourly / close
   • market_brief.py <m> <slot> — macro + sector digest
   • surveillance_fetch.py — daily transcript fetch (personal use only)
   • check_links.py --sites-file sites.json — daily ping / weekly crawl
   • inbox processor every 30 min: summarize → file note (templates/note.md)
     • spoken audio → mark done
5. Build the dashboard (optional but recommended) following references/dashboard-pattern.md. Until then, the latest.json files and notes are the product — readable as-is.
6. Set notification thresholds per job (the >5% mover / site-down defaults are in the cron template). Fewer, louder alerts beat many quiet ones.

Output Contract

Every script writes the same shape:

• <out-dir>/<STAMP>.json — timestamped run output (UTC YYYY-MM-DDTHHMMZ)
• <out-dir>/latest.json — pointer to the newest run; downstream readers only ever read latest.*
• Console: one-line human verdict (67/67 resolved, 5 movers), never a dump
• A shared status.json gets {last_run, result, summary} per job id

Operating Rules

1. Keyless sources first. Yahoo Finance chart API + Google News RSS need no keys. Keyed sources go behind explicit per-source flags.
2. Quiet unless significant. Jobs message the user only on real thresholds; otherwise a one-line verdict in the log. (This rule is what makes 20+ daily jobs livable.)
3. Never fabricate. A failed collection records failed — it never writes plausible-looking fake data. No source, no brief.
4. Licensed content stays local. Transcripts and full-text extractions are personal-consumption only: no public sync, no long quotes.
5. Staleness is visible. Every surface shows "last updated" from status.json. Silent old data is a bug.
6. Secrets live in the environment, never in the repo, the skill, or chat. This skill needs none by default.