Run a day of news for your site

A desk is a folder the user owns: where to look and what counts as news (desk.yaml), how articles read (style.md), and the records of what was already published (records/). This skill runs one day of it. The phone does the reading through MyPhonely, using the app workflows in this repo; you decide what is news, check it, and write it.

Any agent that can read a skill, call MCP tools, search the web and run a shell command can run it: Claude Code, Codex, pi.

Collecting only reads the phone. What leaves the machine: articles, in publish mode; and, when the desk has a share section, a post about each of the day's best articles on the site's own accounts (step 6), which stops for the person's approval unless they have said otherwise.

Inputs

Read the desk first

desk.yaml, style.md, and any other .md in the folder except README.md, which is for people. desk.yaml holds the sources (app, where, how many), the lanes, the score bar, the day's target, and the publish endpoint with its field names. style.md overrides everything here on how an article reads and what it must never say.

The records live where desk.yaml's records says, default <desk>/records/:

• published.jsonl, one line per article ever published: {"date", "title", "source", "sourceUrl", "lane"}. Read it before scoring: never publish the same story twice.
• runs/<date>.md, the day's log, written at the end.
• drafts/<date>/, one .md per article in draft mode.

Run it

1. Collect

One source at a time, one phone task at a time, each small: at most 2-3 items per task and a short report. Long tasks are the ones that end without their result.

Open every source by link, never by typing into an app's search box. Put the link in the phase's openUrl with the app's launch, and start the goal at the page it opens ("The results are open. Read…"). Typing a search failed on X, LinkedIn and Reddit, every time, in both runs of 2026-10-09; the same searches opened by link all worked. URL-encode the query (spaces as %20).

Take the `collect` spec from that workflow's SKILL.md, with the inputs filled in: it is what tells the operator when it has read enough. A goal with no collect scrolls until it runs out of steps (measured 2026-10-09). On Reddit read title, author, upvotes, any external link's domain and the first lines of the body; never copy links in the app.

Give each a claim that says what the lane keeps, so the read filters on the phone: for news, "the post reports an official announcement, a policy, rule or fee change, visa-bulletin movement, a processing-time change or a court ruling, not a personal case question"; for cases, what desk.yaml says a case report is.

Pinned highlights and link posts: a subreddit's "Community highlights" and a link post's title are leads, not stories. Note the title and search for it on the web (step 4); the phone need not open them.

A source that fails or returns nothing is logged and skipped. One bad source never stops the run.

2. Sort into lanes

news. Official announcements and changes that affect many readers. Skip personal posts, questions, memes, ads and job posts. Returning zero from a community is a correct answer: do not pad.

cases (only if the desk has it). People reporting their own outcomes (an approval, an RFE, a denial) with whatever details they chose to share: category, service center, dates, premium processing, field. These are not news one by one: collect them and write one roundup when desk.yaml's cases.min_reports is reached, as its cases.cadence says (say, weekly). In a roundup:

• no names, handles or links to the person's post, and nothing that identifies them (employer, lab, exact field when it is rare): report the facts, not the person;
• say it is self-reported and unverified, and give counts and ranges, not a promise ("of 12 approvals reported this week, 9 had no RFE");
• no advice on anyone's case.

Keep the cases you collected in <records>/cases/<date>.jsonl until they go into a roundup, so a weekly cadence has the whole week.

3. Score and pick

Drop anything already in published.jsonl and merge the same story from several sources. Drop old news: a story is news only if its primary source is dated within target.max_age_days (default 3) or something new happened to it in that window (a court order, an effective date, a new FAQ); then the article is about that new thing. Pinned highlights are often months old. Score each story on the desk's criteria (default: newsworthiness 1-10 and how many readers it affects 1-10) and keep those at or above target.min_score, official sources first, up to target.articles_per_day.

4. Check, then write

For every story you keep, before writing a word:

1. Find the primary source on the web: the agency's page, the Federal Register, the court's ruling, the news article a link post points to. That is the sourceUrl, not the community post. Use your web search tool. With none, a shell still reaches the sources that matter most: the Federal Register's API (curl 'https://www.federalregister.gov/api/v1/documents.json?conditions[term]=<words>&order=newest') for any rule, and the agencies' news pages (desk.yaml may list them under primary_sources). No source found: drop the story.
2. Check every fact you will state (dates, numbers, form and rule names, who said it) against that source. A claim you could not check is left out, or the story is dropped.
3. Write it as style.md says, in the site's language: a headline of your own, a short description, the article, the categories and tags from desk.yaml. Translate sources in other languages; never copy a post's text.

5. Publish or draft

draft (default): write each article to <records>/drafts/<date>/<n>-<slug>.md with the fields as front matter. Nothing is sent.

publish: send each article to desk.yaml's publish.url with its publish.fields mapping, one request per article, and check the response says it was created. Append a line to published.jsonl for each one that was. A failed request is logged; do not retry it blindly.

6. Share (only if desk.yaml has share, and only articles that are live)

Pick the day's strongest published articles, at most share.max_per_day, and post each to the site's own accounts and communities listed under share. Never anywhere else: other people's communities remove a site's links and ban the account.

• Reddit, each community in share.reddit.communities: the reddit-post workflow, a text post: the article's headline as the title; as the body, 3-4 sentences with the key facts, then the article's link on its own line. An account that only ever posts links to one domain trips Reddit's spam filter, even in its own subreddits. Then approve it where share.reddit.moderator is true: open the new post (the subreddit's New feed, by link, then tap it) and look for the "Approved" badge under it. If it is there, done. If not, tap Mod mode disabled at the top of the post page to turn Mod mode on, tap Approve post (not Remove post, not Mark post as spam) and check "Post has been approved." and the badge. The post menu (⋯) has only the author's actions. If the post is missing from the feed, a filter took it: approve it from Mod Tools → Queues → Needs Review. Measured 2026-10-09: in r/quickfiling the post showed Approved at once; in r/immigraus it was live but unapproved and not in the queue, and Mod mode → Approve post approved it.
• X, share.x: one or two sentences, the fact first, then the link (under 280 characters; a link counts as 23). Open the composer already filled in, by link: launch: com.twitter.android, openUrl https://x.com/intent/post?text=<the post, URL-encoded>, and pause. Check the composer shows share.x as the account and the whole text, then tap Post once (two overlapping "Post" labels: either is the same button). Measured 2026-10-09: the x-post workflow's route, the floating button on the timeline, did not register and the operator scrolled instead; the intent link opened the composer filled in, and the post went out from @quickfiling2us.
• LinkedIn, share.linkedin (a company page the phone's member admins, and who reposts it): post as the page, then repost from the member. 1. Open the page in admin view: openUrl https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/companies/?keywords=<page>, tap the result named in share.linkedin.result (another company can share the name), and dismiss a Premium offer if one covers it. Admin view shows Dashboard, Inbox and Start a post. 2. Tap Start a post and stop: check the composer's avatar is the page's logo, not the member's photo, before typing. Type the post (headline, two short paragraphs, the link) and tap Post once; "Post successful" confirms. 3. Find the post with a posts search for its headline in quotes, sorted by date. Check "Comment, react, and repost as" (the avatar left of Like) is set to share.linkedin.repost_as, then Repost → Repost instantly; "Repost successful" confirms. Instantly, so no words go out in the member's name. Measured 2026-10-09: the pause can fire on the wrong screen here too, so confirm each check from a screenshot.
• Discord, share.discord (a server and a channel the phone's account can post in): one run_task phase, launch: com.discord, goal "tap the <server> server icon in the left sidebar, tap the #<channel> text channel (not a voice channel), tap the 'Message #<channel>' bar", pauseWhen "the 'Message #<channel>' box of the <server> server is focused and empty"; then resume_task with typeTexts: [<message>], allowWrites: true, repeat: 1, countLabel: "^Send" and a goal that types the message and taps the send arrow once (never Record Voice Message). The message: the headline in bold, two sentences, the link. Measured 2026-10-09: Discord's accessibility tree keeps reporting the channel-list drawer after a channel opens, so the pause can fire on the wrong screen and the operator can stall. Check the pause's screenshot shows the channel's own feed and its "Message #<channel>" box before resuming; an announcement channel is labelled "<channel> (announcement channel)", not "text channel".
• Write each post fresh from the article, as style.md says. Never the same text in two places.

Every share is a write from the brand's account, so it follows the workflows' pause: with someone watching (share.mode: review, the default), stop at each composer and post only on their yes. With no one watching, write the posts to <records>/share/<date>.md instead and post nothing; post unattended only when share.mode is autopilot. Record each post that went out in <records>/shared.jsonl (date, slug, where) and never share an article twice to the same place.

What comes back

Write <records>/runs/<date>.md and report: each source OK | EMPTY | FAILED with how many items it gave; how many stories after dedupe; how many met the bar; each article's title, source and URL (or draft path); the cases collected and whether a roundup went out; anything skipped because its facts could not be checked.

Notes

• A schedule runs this unattended: give the AI the desk folder, the skills and the MyPhonely server, and say publish in the prompt only when the user has decided to.
• pi: load outreach-day/scripts/adapters/pi.ts with -e. It connects MyPhonely from MYPHONELY_API_KEY with the phone's writing tools hidden, which is all a desk needs. pi has no web search of its own: install one (pi install npm:pi-web-search uses the current model's native search) and load it with -e too, since --no-extensions skips installed ones: pi --no-extensions -e builtin:mcp -e <skills>/outreach-day/scripts/adapters/pi.ts -e ~/.pi/agent/npm/node_modules/pi-web-search --skill <skills> "Run news-desk for <desk> in draft mode". Without an outreach agent loaded, the extension keeps no reservations but still makes every share's phase pause and asks the person before the post goes out (unattended: OUTREACH_UNATTENDED=1, for share.mode: autopilot only).
• No reservations here: published.jsonl keeps a story from going out twice, shared.jsonl a share.
• example/ is a complete fictional desk to copy.