AI news generator

Delivers a daily news digest to a Discord channel via webhook. Use this skill whenever the user wants to: send today's news to Discord, set up an automated d...

Security Scan

The skill's code and instructions match its stated purpose (posting a daily news digest to a Discord webhook); it asks for no unrelated credentials or installs and only posts to the provided Discord webhook.

Purpose & Capability

The name/description say: fetch news and post to Discord. The repository includes a send_to_discord.py that constructs a Discord embed and POSTs to a Discord webhook URL; SKILL.md describes selecting stories and invoking that script. There are no unrelated environment variables, binaries, or external services requested.

Instruction Scope

Instructions tell the agent to run a local date command, perform 2–3 web searches to gather stories, build a JSON and call the bundled script. That scope is consistent with the stated purpose. Note: SKILL.md's example invokes scripts/send_to_discord.py (relative scripts/ path), but the repo contains send_to_discord.py at the top level — this path mismatch will cause runtime errors unless corrected.

Install Mechanism

No install spec is provided (instruction-only skill with a small included script). Nothing is downloaded or written to disk by an installer; risk from install mechanism is minimal.

Credentials

No environment variables or credentials are declared. The skill requires a Discord webhook URL at runtime (a sensitive value) but does not request any unrelated secrets (AWS keys, tokens, etc.). The webhook must be supplied by the user or scheduled task.

Persistence & Privilege

The skill is not force-installed (always:false) and does not request elevated privileges or modify other skills. It does perform network I/O to the provided webhook only.

Assessment

This skill appears to do what it says: aggregate headlines and post them to a Discord webhook. Before installing or scheduling it, review these points: - Webhook safety: the webhook URL is sensitive (anyone with it can post to the channel). Only supply a webhook you control. Do not paste a webhook from a third party. - Network destinations: the script only posts to the provided Discord webhook URL (discord.com). If you need stricter auditing, run the script from a controlled host and monitor outbound traffic. - Fix the path mismatch: SKILL.md shows scripts/send_to_discord.py, but the file is send_to_discord.py at the repo root. Update the scheduled task or the invocation examples so the path points to the actual script location. - Web scraping/privacy: the skill instructs the agent to perform web searches and summarize articles. Ensure the agent's browsing/search behavior complies with your content and copyright policies, and avoid accidentally sending private/personal data to the Discord channel. - Testing: run a manual test with a disposable webhook and verify embed formatting and rate-limit handling before enabling recurring scheduling. If you want stronger guarantees, run the included script from your own scheduled runner and keep the webhook secret in your scheduler's secure config (not in plain text prompts).

Daily News → Discord

This skill fetches the top news stories for the day and delivers them to a Discord channel via webhook as a clean, readable embed.

Configuration

These values are baked into the scheduled task but can be overridden at runtime:

Setting	Default
Webhook URL	Set in scheduled task
Topics	AI & Tech
Stories	5 headlines
Schedule	8:00 AM daily

---

Execution Steps

1. Get today's date

Run a quick bash command to get the current date in a friendly format:

date "+%A, %B %-d, %Y"

2. Search for news

Perform 2–3 targeted web searches to find today's top stories on the configured topics. Use searches like:

• "AI news today [current month year]"
• "tech news [current date]"
• "[specific topic] latest developments [month year]"

Pick the 5 most newsworthy, distinct, and recent stories. Prefer stories from the last 24–48 hours. Skip duplicate coverage of the same event.

3. Build the stories JSON

Format the 5 stories as a JSON array. Each story needs:

[
  {
    "headline": "Short, clear headline (max 80 chars)",
    "summary": "One to two sentence summary of what happened and why it matters. (max 250 chars)",
    "url": "https://source-article-url.com"
  }
]

Keep summaries punchy and informative — no filler phrases like "In a world where...".

4. Send to Discord

Call the bundled send script with the stories JSON, date, and topics:

python3 "$(dirname "$0")/scripts/send_to_discord.py" \
  --webhook "WEBHOOK_URL_HERE" \
  --date "DATE_STRING" \
  --topics "AI & Tech" \
  --stories 'STORIES_JSON_HERE'

Replace placeholders with actual values. Pass the stories JSON as a single-quoted string. If the JSON contains single quotes, use a temp file instead:

echo 'STORIES_JSON' > /tmp/stories.json
python3 scripts/send_to_discord.py --webhook "..." --date "..." --topics "..." --stories-file /tmp/stories.json

5. Confirm delivery

The script prints the HTTP status code. A 204 means success. If it fails, inspect the error output and retry once (Discord webhooks occasionally return 429 rate limits — wait 2 seconds and retry).

---

Discord Message Format

The message is sent as a rich embed:

📰 Daily News Digest — Monday, March 6, 2026
Today's top stories in AI & Tech

1. OpenAI Releases New Reasoning Model
   GPT-5 now available to all users with improved reasoning...
   [Read more]

2. ...
...
──────────────────────────────
OpenClaw Daily News • Powered by Claude

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Customization

To change topics, edit the --topics argument in the scheduled task prompt and adjust the search queries in Step 2. Topics can be comma-separated: "AI, Finance, Science".