last30days-skill: an agent-led research skill that searches Reddit, X, YouTube and Polymarket in parallel

The gap last30days-skill targets: platform walls around recent opinion

General web search indexes pages. It does not index the comment thread under a Reddit post, the reply chain under an X post, or the transcript of a 45-minute YouTube video. The README frames the problem exactly that way: Google search does not touch Reddit comments or X posts, ChatGPT has a Reddit arrangement but cannot search X or TikTok, Gemini has YouTube but not Reddit, and Claude has none of them natively. Each platform is described as a walled garden with its own API, tokens and auth.

The skill's answer is not a new crawler. It is a bundle of per-platform integrations that an agent host calls in parallel, with the user supplying their own keys and browser sessions. The intended audience is narrow and specific: people who already run an Agent Skills host such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot or Gemini CLI, and who have a recurring need for what changed in the last 30 days about a person, company or topic. The README lists the pre-meeting brief, the pre-sales-call check, the pre-build problem scan and even a Disney World trip as actual uses. That range is honest about what the tool is: a recency filter, not a knowledge base.

How the pipeline works: parallel source adapters, engagement scoring, an agent judge

The architecture visible in the repository is a Python skill under skills/last30days/, with scripts and a lib/ directory, plus a SKILL.md that the README calls the source of truth for command and setup behavior. The runtime is Python 3.12 or newer; pyproject.toml lists no runtime dependencies at all, and the dev group holds pytest, pytest-cov, pyyaml and towncrier. So the skill ships as instructions plus scripts that lean on the host for model access and on external CLIs for some sources.

Data flow is fan-out then fan-in. A single invocation searches the enabled sources in parallel, each adapter returning platform-native items: Reddit threads with upvote counts, X posts with likes, YouTube transcripts, TikTok engagement, Polymarket odds, GitHub PR velocity, Hacker News threads. A scoring layer then ranks items by what people engaged with, and an agent judge synthesizes the ranked material into one brief. The README states the ranking intent plainly: social relevancy, not SEO relevancy. Some adapters are not built in but auto-enable when a companion CLI is on PATH, including digg-pp-cli, arxiv-pp-cli and techmeme-pp-cli. Xiaohongshu is the opposite case: it is opt-in with --search xhs and needs a logged-in x-mcp browser plugin or a local xiaohongshu-mcp service. StockTwits auto-activates when the topic resolves to a ticker or crypto.

Installing last30days-skill and running a first brief

Claude Code is the recommended host because the README says it auto-updates through the marketplace. Two commands register the marketplace and install the plugin.

/plugin marketplace add mvanhorn/last30days-skill
/plugin install last30days

For Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Gemini CLI or any other Agent Skills host, the README gives an npx path. The -g flag installs globally for your user so the skill is available in every project; dropping it scopes the install to the current project.

npx skills add mvanhorn/last30days-skill -g

The README mentions further options for claude.ai web, OpenClaw and manual installation, but does not spell them out in the section available here, so check the Install section of the repository for those.

Once installed, invoke the skill with a topic. The README's own example is a person's name.

/last30days Peter Steinberger

With zero configuration you should get results from Reddit, Hacker News, Polymarket and GitHub immediately, because the README states those work out of the box with no API key. The first run also triggers a setup wizard; the README claims it unlocks X, YouTube, TikTok, arXiv, Techmeme and more in about 30 seconds. Expect that wizard to ask for credentials or browser sessions, since those platforms are the ones with auth. If a source you expected is missing from the output, the likely cause is that its adapter never enabled: either its CLI is not on PATH or its credentials were not supplied.

Where last30days-skill breaks down or is the wrong tool

The dependency on live platform APIs and browser sessions is the first constraint. X, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram Reels, LinkedIn, Threads, Pinterest, Bluesky and Meta Ads all sit behind credentials the user must provide, and the README does not document what happens when a token expires mid-run or when a platform rate-limits the adapter. The README does not document rollback, caching or a saved raw result set, so a brief is not something you can re-derive later from stored inputs. If your workflow needs an auditable trail from claim back to source item, this is the wrong shape of tool.

The second constraint is the judge. The synthesis step is an LLM reading ranked platform material, and the README does not describe a deterministic scoring formula or a published weight for upvotes against likes against market odds. Two runs on the same topic can plausibly produce different briefs. That is fine for a pre-meeting scan and bad for anything that has to be cited or reproduced.

Third, the source list is not neutral about subject matter. Polymarket only carries markets that exist, StockTwits only fires on tickers or crypto, and Xiaohongshu needs a local MCP service plus an explicit --search xhs. A topic with no prediction market and no ticker silently loses those signals, and the resulting brief looks complete while resting on fewer inputs. The README does not describe any coverage warning for that case.

How it differs from ChatGPT search, Perplexity and a plain news aggregator

Perplexity is the closest comparison, and the repository treats it as a source rather than a rival: the source table lists Perplexity entries for Controlled Agent API synthesis, an OpenRouter Sonar fallback, raw Search API rows and explicit Deep Research. The difference in approach is where the ranking comes from. Perplexity ranks pages and cited passages by its own retrieval and reranking; last30days-skill ranks platform items by the engagement metrics attached to them, then hands the ranked set to an agent judge. One is a search engine with a synthesis layer. The other is a set of platform adapters with a search engine's output as one input among many.

Against a plain aggregator such as Techmeme, the contrast is sharper. Techmeme is editorial: humans and heuristics pick the story clusters, and the skill consumes it as one date-windowed source. last30days-skill explicitly positions itself against that model, describing Google as aggregating editors while it searches people. Whether engagement-weighted ranking is better depends on the question. For what the developer community thinks about a release, Reddit and HN threads carry more signal than a news write-up. For what actually happened in a market, a news article beats a viral post. The skill's value is that both land in the same brief.

Maintenance, release cadence and the MIT licence

The repository is not archived and the last push was on 2026-09-18, and the release history confirms active development. The release history backs that up: v3.25.0 on 2026-09-18, v3.24.0 on 2026-09-09, and v3.23.1 on 2026-09-08. Three releases inside eleven days is a fast cadence, and it cuts both ways. Fixes arrive quickly, and the SKILL.md spec is explicitly named as the source of truth for current command and setup behavior, which means the README can lag the runtime.

The upgrade path is cheap for Claude Code users because the marketplace handles updates, and the npx install path is a single command to re-run. Changelog entries are managed with towncrier, with fragments in changelog.d/ and a CHANGELOG.md assembled from typed categories: security, removed, deprecated, added, changed, fixed. The test suite runs under pytest with branch coverage gated at 84 percent in pyproject.toml, with a comment stating the floor is intended to rise over time. That gate applies to skills/last30days/scripts and tests, with vendored code and dist/ omitted.

The project is MIT licensed, which permits commercial and private use and modification provided the copyright notice and permission notice are retained. That is a statement about the licence text, not advice about your situation; if you redistribute the skill inside a product, read the LICENSE file in the repository and get your own counsel.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt it if you already run an Agent Skills host and want a repeatable pre-meeting or pre-build briefing that cites engagement rather than editorial ranking. Skip it if you need reproducible, auditable search results, because the ranking is assembled by an LLM judge over live platform data. Before relying on it, verify which sources your host actually enables: the README states Reddit, HN, Polymarket and GitHub work with zero config, while X, YouTube, TikTok and the rest require the setup wizard and your own credentials.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Official README
2. Project repository
3. Release notes