News Curator

Three daily briefings: morning (7:30am), afternoon (3pm), evening (10pm). Each uses a direct isolated cron session — no sub-agents, no sessions_yield, no spawn.

Architecture — Critical

DO NOT use sessions_spawn + sessions_yield. The yield causes the parent session file to change during the wait, triggering EmbeddedAttemptSessionTakeoverError. Instead:

• Cron fires sessionTarget: "isolated" with kind: "agentTurn"
• Agent does ALL work in one shot: curl feeds → parse XML → curate → output briefing
• Final response auto-delivers to Telegram via delivery.mode: "announce"
• No sessions_spawn, no sessions_yield, no send_message
• Explicitly tell the agent: "Use exec tool with curl. Do NOT use fetch tool." MiniMax defaults to fetch which returns HTML blocks on some RSS endpoints.

Prompt Essentials

Every news cron prompt MUST include:

1. "Use exec tool with curl. Do NOT use fetch tool." — MiniMax M3 prefers its built-in fetch tool which gets blocked by many RSS endpoints. curl -sL works. Without this line, the model will use fetch and fail.

2. "Final response = the briefing. Nothing else. No meta, no talk about what you did." — Without this, MiniMax often outputs a description of its process ("Gus fetched the feeds and curated 5 stories...") instead of the actual briefing.

3. Do NOT use "send_message" — The final reply auto-delivers. Using message tool causes duplicate delivery or errors.

4. "Real URLs from feeds only. No fake links." — The model may fabricate headlines.

5. List each curl command on its own line. The model will run them sequentially via exec tool.

Sources (verified working with curl -sL --max-time 25)

DO NOT use The Verge RSS (https://www.theverge.com/rss/ai-artificial-intelligence/index.xml) — returns HTML captcha, always blocked.

DO NOT use Google News RSS — 400 error.

DO NOT use Nasdaq RSS — returns empty/000.

Reuters, CNBC, Yahoo Finance RSS feeds also unreliable (block flakily). Stick to the verified list above.

Filtering rules

Skip: crypto, forex, personal finance ("I have $X saved what do I do"), NFT, price predictions, spam, earnings transcript full text, obituaries, press releases.

Prefer: major AI lab/product/policy news, big market swings, Fed/rates signals, tech positioning, AI capex reality checks, Nasdaq-moving events. Hobo likes knowing when to buy the dip.

Target 5-7 stories per briefing, split roughly half AI and half markets. 1500-3000 chars total.

Delivery format

Each cron's prompt has its own formatted template. General structure:

{{emoji}} *Patch {{time}} briefing* [time SGT]

*AI & TECH*
1. [Headline](full url) — one punchy sentence

*MARKETS & MONEY*
1. [Headline](full url) — what moved, signal for tech

*NOTES*
Feeds that failed, if any.

~ Patch

Emojis: morning 🌅, afternoon 🌤️, evening 🌙.

Cron schedule & collision avoidance

CRITICAL: With maxConcurrentRuns: 2, any two crons firing at the same minute will collide and trigger EmbeddedAttemptSessionTakeoverError. Every cron's minute must be unique.

Rule: Never put two crons on the same minute. If unavoidable, shift one by 3-5 minutes.

Model config

MiniMax M3 is the primary. DeepSeek V4 Flash falls back cleanly if MiniMax times out. The EmbeddedAttemptSessionTakeoverError only happens when two crons share a minute, not from model issues.

Session setup

• sessionTarget: "isolated" — fresh session per run, no memory of previous chats
• sessionKey — unique per cron (e.g. session:cron:patch-news-morning-briefing)
• delivery.mode: "announce" — agent's final response auto-sent to Telegram
• delivery.to: "37134287" — Hobo's chat ID

What NOT to do (lessons from failures)

1. No spawn + yield — sessions_spawn + sessions_yield triggers session file fence check failure
2. No sub-agents for this — the isolated session already is a fresh session. Adding a sub-agent wrapper adds the yield problem and extra cost for no benefit
3. No sending to the main Telegram session — give each cron its own sessionKey. Main session key collisions cause lock contention
4. Don't use the fetch tool — MiniMax's built-in fetch blocks on many RSS endpoints. Force exec + curl
5. Don't skip "no meta" instructions — MiniMax defaults to verbose meta-commentary about what it did instead of outputting the briefing
6. Don't put two crons on the same minute — maxConcurrentRuns: 2 still causes session file races when both fire simultaneously. Offset by at least 3 minutes

Legacy

• fetch-news.py — old script for parallel RSS fetching (no longer used)
• news-pending/ — directory for old 2-step flow (no longer used)
• send-news.sh, deliver-news.sh — legacy shell wrappers (deprecated)
• All replaced by direct isolated cron agentTurn with inline curl