Pi Durable News Agent

Overview

Problem: Agent news is a firehose of launches, benchmarks, and threads, and a chat assistant only helps after you remember to ask and read what comes back.

Built for: Engineers who want an always-on news desk on a Mac, Mac mini, Linux box, or exe.dev VM, with Jev judging every item before it becomes a card.

First indexed on Jev Directory: 2026-10-21

Creator and team

Name

IndyDevDan

Organization

IndyDevDan

Handle

@disler

GitHub

“This agent does not wait for you to work. It works for you, then waits, then keeps working.”

How Jev is used

Role in the product flow

Cheap judge at every sweep gate: relevance, worth-attention, same-story dedupe, importance rank, claim-support, and hfs Hype/Facts/Signal scoring on excerpts plus page text

Primitives

ScoreNoul

State in

Feed items, scraped page text, story cards, and command-specific rubrics in apps/dna-server-api/prompt_engineering/jev/*/command.json (relevance, worth-attention, importance, hfs, same-story, claim-support).

Decision out

Filtered and ranked stories, merged coverage on duplicate narratives, top N cards per sweep, per-card Hype/Facts/Signal scores, and research findings from subagents.

1. dna-server-cron POST /v1/workflows/news-sweep on schedule (default every 5 minutes, 1 to 60 or off)
2. dna.news-sweep durable task gathers due sources, weighted topic search over 7 days, nothing older than 14 days
3. Jev relevance and worth-attention on each new item; same-story dedupe; importance picks top 7 (1 to 30 configurable)
4. Up to four news-researcher subagents with claim-support; jev hfs scores excerpt plus page text
5. present_news and present_timeline pick UI components; feedback labels become few-shot examples for the next sweep

Features and stack

Features

• Cron-driven proactive sweeps with pi-durable checkpointed phases
• 28 sources plus weighted topic search; default 7 cards per sweep
• Jev hfs scores Hype, Facts, and Signal on excerpt plus page text
• Vue browser, pi-tui, and dna CLI over 26 shared API capabilities
• Deploy local Mac, ssh Mac mini, Linux systemd, or exe.dev VM
• Show me more or less and H/F/S labels feed few-shot examples
• recovery.test.ts SIGKILL mid gate; live restart.mjs mid sweep

Stack

• TypeScript
• Node 24
• pi-durable and durable-agent package
• Vue 3 and Vite UI
• SQLite agent.sqlite and dna.sqlite
• OpenRouter (README cost measurements)
• MIT

Pricing: MIT code. README measured costs use OpenRouter with Claude Haiku 5.5: about $0.32 for the first sweep, about $0.0065 when news arrives later, about $0.003 on empty sweeps, jev about $0.00004 per call. Optional OpenAI images about $0.005 each. Search is free by default (Bing News, Google News, Hacker News, feeds).

Links

• Website
• Repository
• Documentation

FAQ

How is this different from JEV Paper Radar?

Paper Radar is a forkable weekday arXiv and RSS digest with GitHub Actions. Pi Durable News Agent is an always-on pi-durable server with cron sweeps, SQLite checkpoints, browser and TUI clients, and continuous Hype, Facts, and Signal scoring on a mixed source list.

What does hfs mean on each card?

README Hype, Facts and Signal table: Hype is attention without substance, Facts are objectively true statements, Signal is information you can act on. The hfs command scores all three because items can mix labels; it uses Jev's score type, not choice.

What schedule does the agent use?

README default is every 5 minutes (1 to 60 or off) from the top bar, CLI, or agent. dna-server-cron fires a one minute tick; the schedule decides which ticks start a sweep.

What happens if the server crashes mid sweep?

README Durability: state is in SQLite; recovery.test.ts SIGKILLs during the jev gate and the restarted server resumes at the last chunk, pays jev once per item, and presents each card once.

What are the honest limits?

README Where it can still fail: free search is rate limited, the first sweep reads thousands of items and costs more, and component rules plus taste questions do not make the model infallible.