claudegoodies
Skill

watchers

From NousResearch

Poll RSS, JSON APIs, and GitHub with watermark dedup.

Facts

Repository
NousResearch/hermes-agent
Status
Actively maintained
Last commit
Source file
optional-skills/devops/watchers/SKILL.md

Source preview

The instructions Claude Code reads when this skill runs.

# Watchers

Poll external sources on an interval and react only to new items. Three ready-made scripts plus a shared watermark helper; wire them into a cron job (or run them ad-hoc from the terminal).

## When to Use

- User wants to watch an RSS/Atom feed and be notified of new entries
- User wants to watch a GitHub repo's issues / pulls / releases / commits
- User wants to poll an arbitrary JSON endpoint and get notified on new items
- User asks for "a watcher for X" or "notify me when X changes"

## Mental model

A watcher is just a script that:

1. Fetches data from the external source
2. Compares against a watermark file of previously-seen IDs
3. Writes the new watermark back
4. Prints new items to stdout (or nothing on no-change)

The scripts below handle all three. The agent runs them via the terminal tool — from a cron job, a webhook, or an interactive chat — and reports what's new.

## Ready-made scripts

All three live in `$HERMES_HOME/skills/devops/watchers/scripts/` once the skill is installed. Each reads `WATCHER_STATE_DIR` (defaults to `$HERMES_HOME/watcher-state/`) for its state file, keyed by the `--name` argument.

| Script | What it watches | Dedup key |
|---|---|---|
| `watch_rss.py` | RSS 2.0 or Atom feed URL | `<guid>` / `<id>` |
| `watch_http_json.py` | Any JSON endpoint returning a list of objects | Configurable id field |
| `watch_github.py` | GitHub iss
View full source on GitHub →

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