Skill

techmeme

Tech news aggregation and curation. No official API exists. This spec describes the RSS, OPML, search, and HTML surfaces available for programmatic access. No authentication required.

Verified: 2026-05-13 (printing-press-ingest-2026-05-13+enrich-capability-skill)

When to use techmeme

Choose if

You want an agent to brief a user on tech news — what shipped today, what's trending, which journalists are covering a beat — and you don't need anything older than 5 days. Versus a generic Google News scrape, Techmeme already does the editorial curation; the CLI just makes the RSS/OPML/search surfaces agent-callable with `--compact` output and a built-in rate limiter.

Avoid if

You need historical archive deeper than the 5-day rolling river, or coverage beyond the top-15 RSS slice, or anything Techmeme doesn't already aggregate (it's tech-only, US-centric, and editorially curated — not a firehose). Also avoid if you need an officially-supported API with SLAs; Techmeme has none.

Risk Flags

  • LOW scope No official Techmeme API exists. The CLI parses RSS, OPML, search, and HTML surfaces; structural changes upstream can break parsers.
  • LOW data_quality The river endpoint exposes only a 5-day rolling archive of headlines. RSS feed is capped at the top 15 headlines. Older or deeper-tail coverage is not retrievable.

Cost

Type: Free · Free tier: Free — Techmeme has no API, the CLI uses RSS/OPML/search/HTML surfaces. No auth, no API key, no rate-limited paid tier on the upstream side. Local rate limiting via `--rate-limit` is available to be a good citizen.

Install

Default

npx -y @mvanhorn/printing-press install techmeme
# No API key needed. Be a good citizen — keep request rate low:
<cli> river --rate-limit 1

Setup docs →

Estimated time to first success: ~5 min

Dependencies

Minimum runtime: Node.js (or Go 1.23+ for `go install` alternative)

Distribution

Repository
https://github.com/mvanhorn/printing-press-library
License
MIT