Octopus Hot News Brief

Problem

“Recent-news” queries such as “what happened recently” often fall back to generic search or web browsing, returning stale items, reposts, headlines without links, and sources that are hard to verify. Hot News Brief constrains these requests into an auditable retrieval pass: a strict 7-day window, at most 10 items, and each item must keep its title, source, YYYY-MM-DD date, and clickable link.

How It Works

The skill runs through search_mode=fast or search_mode=deep. Fast mode fits clear keywords such as a company, product, or event, and performs one search with up to 30 raw results. Deep mode is enabled only on explicit user request, plans six parallel roles—latest updates, synonyms and related concepts, official announcements, enterprise products and partnerships, financing/M&A/performance, and trend, risk, and opportunity—then cleans, deduplicates, scores, and renders the results in memory.

The fixed flow is: detect recent-news intent → check required MCP tools → plan topic and output mode → collect webPages.value → filter by date, URL, domain cap, and duplicate stories → select at most 10 distinct events → generate 1–3 evidence-based summaries, and optionally append decision briefs, content radar, or combined notes.

Boundaries and Notes

It does not handle static knowledge, writing, translation, math, code, or other requests without recent-news intent, and it excludes political elections, war and military affairs, sovereignty, weapons deployment, and intelligence topics. Deep mode is not auto-upgraded; if the topic is missing, it asks once and makes zero search calls. Normal responses do not generate files or run scripts, and only host-dropped oversized responses allow one built-in compression step.