Pilot Service Agents News

News feeds, forum aggregators, and current-events streams — Hacker News, dev.to, GDELT, Reddit, Stack Exchange, USGS hazards. Use this skill when: 1. Pulling current tech news / top stories (HN top/new, Lobsters, dev.to) 2. Searching discussion archives (HN Algolia, Stack Exchange) 3. Monitoring real-time events — hurricanes, earthquakes, spaceflight news Do NOT use this skill when: - Mainstream press articles (not in catalogue — use an external news API) - Scholarly literature (use pilot-service-agents-academic) - Sports scores (use pilot-service-agents-sports)

News feeds, forum aggregators, and current-events streams — Hacker News, dev.to, GDELT, Reddit, Stack Exchange, USGS hazards.

All agents in this category follow the standard contract described in pilot-service-agents. Send /help to any agent to read its exact filter schema — the table below is a snapshot; the catalogue grows, so always verify with a fresh list-agents query.

Agents in this category (snapshot)

Hostname	Description
dev-to-articles	dev.to article feed / search
gdelt-context-api	GDELT Context 2.0 - global event context data
hackernews-jobstories	Hacker News — job postings feed
hackernews-newstories	Hacker News — newest stories
hn-algolia-search	HN Algolia search
hn-item	HN item by id
hn-top	HN top stories list
lemmy-posts	Lemmy Posts
lobsters-hottest	Lobsters Hottest
mediawiki-featured	Mediawiki Featured
noaa-nhc-storms	NOAA National Hurricane Center - active tropical storms
openbrewerydb-breweries	OpenBreweryDB - worldwide brewery directory
openlibrary-trending	Openlibrary Trending
reddit-public-sub	Reddit public subreddit feed (JSON)
spaceflight-news-articles	Spaceflight news aggregator (articles)
spaceflight-news-blogs	Spaceflight news aggregator (blogs)
stackexchange-questions	Stack Overflow questions
usgs-earthquakes	USGS real-time global earthquake feed
wayback-available	Wayback Machine snapshot lookup

What you can expect

• Low-latency feeds of developer/tech content
• Archive.org Wayback and GDELT global-events context
• Public subreddit and Lemmy-community feeds (no auth)

What NOT to expect

• Paywalled or syndicated press content
• Full-text rich media — feeds return titles/URLs/snippets

Commands (same pattern for every agent in the category)

# Read an agent's filter contract
pilotctl --json send-message <hostname> --data "/help"
pilotctl --json inbox

# Fetch structured data
pilotctl --json send-message <hostname> --data '/data {json filters}'
pilotctl --json inbox

# Natural-language summary (Gemini)
pilotctl --json send-message <hostname> --data '/summary {json filters}'
pilotctl --json inbox

Response shape

send-message returns an ACK envelope immediately ({"ack":"ACK TEXT N bytes", "bytes":N, "target":"<address>", "type":"text"}). The actual agent response arrives a few seconds later and is read with pilotctl --json inbox. Each inbox entry carries the agent's normalised envelope in its data field:

{
  "source": "<hostname>",
  "items":  [...],
  "count":  <int>,
  "total":  <int|null>,
  "page":   <int|null>,
  "next":   <cursor|null>,
  "truncated": <bool>,
  "upstream_url": "<resolved upstream URL>"
}

/help returns plain text. /summary returns a Gemini-generated prose string. Free-text queries also return Gemini prose.

Workflow Example

# 1. Fresh discovery — the catalogue grows, never hard-code
pilotctl --json send-message list-agents --data '/data {"category":"news","limit":20}'
pilotctl --json inbox

# 2. Read the contract of a specific agent
pilotctl --json send-message hn-top --data '/help'
pilotctl --json inbox

# 3. Query it
pilotctl --json send-message hn-top --data '/data {"limit":10}'
pilotctl --json inbox

Dependencies

Requires the pilot-protocol core skill, the pilot-service-agents skill (for the general discovery flow), pilotctl on PATH, and a running daemon joined to network 9.