briefsnap

One command. Five data sources. Your morning in one digest.

briefsnap pulls Hacker News, RSS feeds, Bluesky profiles, GitHub repos, and arXiv papers in parallel and formats them as a combined morning briefing — text or JSON.

$ briefsnap
# Morning Briefing — August 15, 2026

## Hacker News

1. **Show HN: I built a thing**  (342 points · 87 comments · by someone)
   https://example.com/thing
...

Install

pip install briefsnap

Requires Python 3.10+. Pulls in the five *snap sibling packages automatically.

Quickstart

# Default: HN top 5 stories
briefsnap

# More HN stories
briefsnap --hn 10

# Add an RSS feed
briefsnap --rss https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/

# Follow a Bluesky handle
briefsnap --bsky simonw.bsky.social

# Watch a GitHub repo
briefsnap --repo simonw/llm

# arXiv search
briefsnap --arxiv "LLM agents"

# Mix and match
briefsnap --hn 5 --rss https://news.ycombinator.com/rss --bsky simonw.bsky.social

# JSON output
briefsnap --output json | jq .

Config file

For a repeatable daily briefing, drop a briefsnap.toml anywhere and point at it with --config:

[hackersnap]
enabled = true
limit   = 5
type    = "top"   # top / new / best / ask / show / job

[feedsnap]
feeds = [
  { url = "https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/", limit = 5 },
  { url = "https://www.joelonsoftware.com/feed/", limit = 3 },
]

[bskysnap]
handles = [
  { handle = "simonw.bsky.social", limit = 5 },
]

[reposnap]
repos = [
  { repo = "simonw/llm", limit = 5 },
]

[arxivsnap]
queries = [
  { query = "LLM agents", limit = 3 },
]

briefsnap --config briefsnap.toml
briefsnap --config briefsnap.toml --output json

CLI flags override the config file — handy for one-off adjustments:

briefsnap --config briefsnap.toml --hn 10

Output modes

Agent / ACLI support

briefsnap introspect   # ACLI-compliant JSON description
briefsnap skill        # agentskills.io SKILL.md

How it works

• Each source is fetched in a separate thread (ThreadPoolExecutor) — five sources run in parallel, not serially.
• One source failing (network error, bad feed) does not kill the digest — it falls back to an empty section.
• Uses hackersnap, feedsnap, bskysnap, rook-reposnap, and arxivsnap as library imports.

License

MIT