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Installable agent skill

Release Source Capture

Free Codex/Hermes skill for monitoring GitHub releases and RSS feeds, deduping changes locally, and emitting JSON events for sourced research briefs.

Austin Witherow
3 min read

Installable Source

The website page is the guide. The install command downloads the curated source files from Build Lean SaaS. Maintainers can also copy skills/content/release-source-capture from the repository root.

Release Source Capture is a free Codex/Hermes skill that works as a GitHub release watcher and RSS release monitor. It watches trusted GitHub releases and RSS/Atom feeds, dedupes changes locally, and emits normalized JSON events for article briefs, course updates, or agent workflows.

Use it as the capture layer for a release notes watcher: cron runs the cheap detector, and Codex or Hermes only gets involved when a meaningful change appears.

The installable source lives here:

It includes the SKILL.md instructions and a Node script that can run from cron or a Hermes scheduled job.

Use this when

  • You want to monitor trusted product releases without scraping the whole web.
  • You need a cheap cron-friendly detector before involving an LLM.
  • You want Codex or Hermes to write briefs only when a real source changes.
  • You maintain tutorials, docs, courses, or SaaS content that can go stale when tools ship updates.
  • You want local state-file dedupe instead of repeated notifications for the same release.

What it does

  • Reads an allowlisted source registry.
  • Supports GitHub releases and simple RSS/Atom feeds in v1.
  • Emits normalized JSON events.
  • Dedupes events by source and hash in a local state file.
  • Supports --dry-run so you can preview without mutating state.
  • Keeps LLM calls out of the hourly detector.
  • Does not write drafts, create CMS entries, or publish anything.

Install

Install the free skill by copying these commands into your Codex or Hermes skill directory:

Requires Node 18+ because the script uses built-in fetch. Node 20+ is recommended for server installs.

Create a registry

Save the source allowlist outside the skill folder so you can update it without reinstalling the skill:

Run a dry run

The output is a JSON object with an events array. Each event includes the source id, source type, product, title, URL, published time, summary, and hash.

Before writing state, check that the URLs are canonical, the summaries are useful enough for triage, and repeated dry runs do not produce surprise duplicates.

Seed state before alerting

On the first non-dry run, every current release/feed item is new because the state file is empty.

Run once manually to seed state before enabling alerts:

Then wire the same command into cron or Hermes.

Run hourly

Treat non-empty stdout as a handoff, not a publishing trigger. Send the events into a later Hermes/Codex research prompt and keep this script limited to capture, dedupe, and state updates.

Pair it with the tutorial

Next: follow the full release watcher tutorial:

That lesson shows how to turn raw release events into a ranked content workflow: registry design, hourly detection, scoring, research briefs, breaking-compatibility checks, and human approval.

Need help wiring this into a VPS, cron job, Discord approval loop, or Codex/Hermes workflow? Get setup help.