last30days - Online AI Research Skill

An AI agent-led search engine scored by upvotes, likes, and real money - not editors.
by mvanhorn

Why this exists

I built it to keep up in AI. Everything changes every day and the Reddit and X nerds are always on top of it first. I needed better prompts, and the training data was always months behind what the community had already figured out.

But it turned into something bigger. Now I run it before a sales call to know the last 30 days truth about a business. Before a meeting to read someone's recent tweets and podcast transcripts. Before a Disney World trip to know which rides are closed and what the community says about Genie+. Before I build anything to know what problems people are actually hitting.

If you're meeting with a CEO, have you read all their tweets and YouTube transcripts from the last 30 days? I have.

Sources, scored by the people

Community contributors keep adding more. Truth Social, Xiaohongshu (RED), and others are in the engine with more on the way.

A Reddit thread with 1,500 upvotes is a stronger signal than a blog post nobody read. A TikTok with 3.6M views tells you more about what's culturally relevant than a press release. Polymarket odds backed by $66K in volume are harder to argue with than a pundit's guess.

The synthesis ranks by what real people actually engaged with. Social relevancy, not SEO relevancy.

What people actually use it for

Before a meeting. /last30days Peter Steinberger - joined OpenAI's Codex team, fighting Anthropic's ban on third-party agents, 23 PRs merged at 85% merge rate on GitHub, building LobsterOS for cross-device agent control. r/ClaudeCode: "Ever since OpenClaw released, it was widely known that if you run it through anything other than the API, you were gonna get banned eventually" (227 upvotes). That's not on LinkedIn.

To read hiring signals. /last30days Listen Labs --hiring-signals - current jobs and careers pages become cited evidence for focus shifts: hiring into enterprise security, customer success, infrastructure, or product expansion. The report says what the hiring appears to signal, not what the roadmap will ship.

When something drops. /last30days Kanye West - UK blocked his visa, Wireless Festival canceled, sponsors fled. But BULLY debuted #2 on Billboard. Fantano came back from his "Yay sabbatical" to review it (653K views). SoFi Homecoming brought out Lauryn Hill and Travis Scott for 44 songs. Polymarket: "Will Kanye tweet again?" 86% Yes. 23 Reddit threads, 17 YouTube videos, 86K upvotes.

To compare tools. /last30days OpenClaw vs Hermes vs Paperclip - "These aren't competitors, they're layers." OpenClaw is the executor (351K GitHub stars, live), Hermes is the self-improving brain (31K stars), Paperclip is the org chart (49K stars). Star counts pulled live from the GitHub API, not stale blog posts. Side-by-side table with architecture, memory, security, best-for. Per @IMJustinBrooke: "OpenClaw = Charmander, Hermes = Charizard."

To understand the world. /last30days Iran vs USA - Day 38 of the war. Trump's Tuesday deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Two US warplanes downed. Oil at $126/barrel. The IEA called it "the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market." Polymarket: ceasefire by Dec 31 at 74%. 27 X posts, 10 YouTube videos, 20 prediction markets.

Before a trip. /last30days Universal Epic Universe - Expansion already under construction. "Project 680" permit filed. Fireworks show confirmed by infrastructure but unannounced. Wait times: Mine-Cart Madness averaging 148 minutes. No annual pass yet, and locals are frustrated. Stardust Racers down for refurbishment through April 5.

To learn something fast. /last30days Nano Banana Pro prompting - JSON-structured prompts are replacing tag soup. @pictsbyai's nested format prevents "concept bleeding." Edit-first workflow beats regeneration. Then it writes you a production prompt using exactly what the community said works.

What v3 Changed

Shareable HTML briefs

Ask for an HTML brief and the skill saves a self-contained, dark-mode, print-friendly file you can drop into Slack, email, or Notion. No raw markdown leaks. Inline CSS, system-font fallbacks behind Inter and JetBrains Mono. No JavaScript. Works offline.

/last30days OpenClaw --emit=html

or just ask in plain language:

/last30days OpenClaw, give me a shareable HTML brief
/last30days Cursor IDE for slack
/last30days Anthropic earnings export as html

The skill emits the synthesis in chat as usual AND saves a brief to ${LAST30DAYS_MEMORY_DIR}/{topic}-brief.html (defaults to ~/Documents/Last30Days/). The chat response ends with the file path so you can open it or drag it into a message.

What's in the file: badge, inline metadata line, the model's synthesis verbatim with all citations, the engine footer (✅ All agents reported back! tree), and a colophon noting the topic + how to re-run. Data quality warnings (degraded run, thin evidence, etc.) stay in the engine's stderr logs; they never leak into the shareable artifact.

For direct CLI use without the model in the loop, the engine also accepts --synthesis-file PATH to convert any markdown synthesis to HTML.

Intelligent search: the killer feature

The v3 engine doesn't just search for your topic. It figures out where to search before the search begins. Type "OpenClaw" and the engine resolves @steipete (Peter Steinberger, the creator), r/openclaw, r/ClaudeCode, and the right YouTube channels and TikTok hashtags - all via a new Python pre-research brain built by @j-sperling. The old engine searched keywords. The new engine understands your topic first, then searches the right people and communities.

This is why v3 finds content v2 never could. "Paperclip" resolves @dotta. "Dave Morin" resolves @davemorin plus @OpenClaw plus the TWiST podcast. "Peter Steinberger" resolves @steipete on X and steipete on GitHub. Bidirectional: person to company, product to founder, name to GitHub profile. The right subreddits, the right handles, the right hashtags - resolved before a single API call fires.

Best Takes

Reddit and X people are funny. The old engine buried their best stuff because it scored for relevance, not cleverness. v3 has a second judge that scores every result for humor, wit, and virality alongside the relevance score. Tommy Lloyd's "My Michael Jordan is Steve Kerr" scores low on relevance to "Arizona Basketball" but off the charts on fun. Now every brief ends with a "Best Takes" section - the cleverest one-liners, the most viral quotes, the reactions that make you want to share the research. Built in, not a toggle.

Cross-source cluster merging

When the same story appears on Reddit, X, and YouTube, v3 merges them into one cluster instead of showing three separate items. Entity-based overlap detection catches matches even when the titles use different words.

Single-pass comparisons

"CLI vs MCP" used to run three serial passes (12+ minutes). v3 runs one pass with entity-aware subqueries for both sides simultaneously. Same depth, 3 minutes.

Auto-discovered competitor comparisons

/last30days OpenAI --competitors tells the hosting reasoning model to discover the top 2 peers via WebSearch (Anthropic, xAI), run Step 0.55 per entity, and invoke the engine with "OpenAI vs Anthropic vs xAI" and a per-entity --competitors-plan JSON. The engine fans out 3 full pipelines in parallel, saves a *-raw.md file per entity, and merges them into a 3-way comparison. Same mechanics power /last30days "OpenAI vs Anthropic vs xAI" directly.

GitHub person-mode

When the topic is a person, the engine switches from keyword search to author-scoped queries. Instead of "who mentioned this name in an issue body," it answers: what are they shipping and where is it landing?

/last30days Peter Steinberger --github-user=steipete shows 22 PRs merged across 3 repos at 85% merge rate. Own projects with README summaries, star counts, and top feature requests. Release notes for what shipped this month. The synthesizer weaves it into the narrative alongside X posts and Reddit threads.

ELI5 mode

Say "eli5 on" after any research run. The synthesis rewrites in plain language. No jargon. Same data, same sources, same citations - just clearer. "Arizona wins by being physical" instead of "Arizona's identity is paint scoring (50%+ shooting, 9th nationally)." Say "eli5 off" to go back.

Everything else in v3

• Free Reddit comments. Public JSON gives you threads + top comments with upvote counts. No API key, no ScrapeCreators. Just works.
• YouTube transcripts that actually work. Widened candidate pool 3x past music videos to reach talk/review content with captions.
• TikTok, Instagram, Threads. All three activate automatically once SCRAPECREATORS_API_KEY is set — same key, same per-call cost. Suppress any of them with EXCLUDE_SOURCES=tiktok,instagram,threads (any comma-separated subset).
• Pinterest. Per-query opt-in (visual pins, narrow utility): the model passes --search=pinterest for the runs that need it. Requires SCRAPECREATORS_API_KEY.
• YouTube comments + transcript fallback. Both activate automatically once SCRAPECREATORS_API_KEY is set, the same default-on backup tier. Transcripts only fall back to ScrapeCreators when yt-dlp fails (no credit spent on success); comments are bounded to the top few videos (~3 extra calls per run). Suppress comments with EXCLUDE_SOURCES=youtube_comments. TikTok comments stay opt-in via INCLUDE_SOURCES=tiktok_comments. Surface top comments with vote counts the same way Reddit does.
• Perplexity Sonar / Search API / Deep Research. Grounded web search via direct Perplexity (PERPLEXITY_API_KEY) or OpenRouter Sonar fallback (OPENROUTER_API_KEY). Add one of those keys plus INCLUDE_SOURCES=perplexity (it's a separate paid API - opt-in keeps you from being surprise-billed). Direct Perplexity can return Sonar synthesis, raw ranked Search API rows, or both.
• Polymarket noise filtering. Common-word disambiguation prevents "Apple" from matching "Will Apple release a car?"
• Resilient Reddit. Timeout budgets and runtime fallback. One slow thread doesn't kill the whole run.
• Fun judge v2. Humor scoring baked into the narrative. Reddit's cleverest one-liners mixed into the synthesis where they fit, not dumped in a separate section.
• Polymarket odds, not dollars. The % odds are the magic. Dollar volumes removed from display.
• Per-author cap. Max 3 items per author prevents any single voice from dominating your brief.
• Entity disambiguation. When the engine resolves handles, the synthesis trusts them. No more Mallorca resorts winning over Washington athletic clubs.
• OpenClaw first-class citizen. Auto-resolve for engine-side pre-research. Device auth for frictionless ScrapeCreators signup.
• 1,012 tests passing.