Daily News Briefing

Build an agent that wakes up every morning at 8 a.m., gathers yesterday’s news on your topics of interest, and delivers a one-message summary to your chat with a push notification. No code — just toggles and a plain-language instruction.

What you’ll end up with

• A push notification on your phone at a fixed time every morning (e.g., 8 a.m.).
• Tapping it opens the same agent chat where yesterday’s news, summarized, is waiting as a single message.
• If you happen to be looking at that chat at the moment of delivery, the push is skipped and the response just appears on screen.

Step 1: Create a new agent

1. Click the + button at the top of the left sidebar (on iOS, the + icon at the top right of the Agents tab). This opens a chat with the Agent Father guide.
2. Describe the agent you want in one line — e.g. “Build me an assistant that summarizes yesterday’s news into a single morning briefing.” Father runs a short interview and creates the agent, filling in the name, tools, and behavior. You can refine the tools and instructions in the steps below afterward.

Step 2: Turn on the right tools

On the agent’s page open the Settings tab → Enabled Tools section. You only need:

• Web Search — to actually find yesterday’s news
• Notify User — autonomous-runs only. When the agent wakes up on a schedule it delivers the report to the chat and sends a push notification at the same time (during normal chat your text reply is delivered directly, so this tool isn’t shown)
• (Optional) Canvas Create — if you’d like the report saved as an in-app canvas document

Leaving other tools off keeps the agent fast and cheaper.

Step 3: Write the system prompt (instructions)

Father already filled in a baseline set of instructions when it created the agent. You refine them in the System Prompt field on the same Settings tab — you don’t have to write them from scratch. Use the example below as a reference, adjusting the topics to whatever you actually care about.

You are a daily news curator who sends a morning briefing.

Topics of interest:
- Generative AI and LLM industry trends
- Semiconductors / cloud infrastructure
- Korean startup funding news

When you wake up on a scheduled run, do the following:
1. Use web search to find the major stories from "yesterday" on those topics (English and Korean sources both).
2. Merge duplicate stories into one line, with a source link.
3. End with one short "worth checking today" suggestion.
4. Wrap everything into a single Send-to-User message.

Keep the report short enough to scan on a phone in under a minute.

Step 4: Set up the schedule — “every day at 8 a.m.”

Ask the agent in plain language — the easiest way.

In the same agent’s chat, type:

Please register a schedule to send the news briefing every day at 8 a.m.

The agent will create its own schedule. When an approval button appears on screen, tap it once and you’re done. The agent calculates the time based on your account’s time zone.

Note — The Schedules tab in the UI lets you set up a recurring check-in profile that wakes the agent on a repeating interval (e.g. every 2 hours during business hours). For a fixed daily schedule that fires at one specific time, ask the agent as shown above — that is the only supported path.

For more on schedules see Scheduling Agent Runs.

Step 5: Prepare to receive push notifications

To get pushes on your phone, set this up once:

1. On the web, go to Settings → Notifications.
2. Make sure the master push toggle and the Agent response toggle are both on.
3. Install the iOS app, sign in, and Allow notifications when prompted on first launch.

See the Notifications page for the full setup walkthrough and troubleshooting checklist.

Step 6: Test-run it yourself

Don’t wait until tomorrow morning — kick it off from the chat once:

Make me yesterday's news briefing right now.

When you run it this way, the result comes back as a chat message directly in the conversation. Because you’re looking at the chat while it runs, no push notification is sent — that is expected. (Pushes are sent only when you’re not viewing the chat, whether the run is scheduled or manual.)

Tweak anything you don’t like in plain language: “put the source links at the bottom”, “skip politics”, “cut to 5 headlines”.

Step 7: Polish tips

• Add/replace topics — just edit the “Topics of interest” section in the system prompt.
• Restrict to trusted outlets — write something like “prefer sources like techcrunch.com, theverge.com, reuters.com” and the agent will use the web search tool’s domain allow-list option on its own.
• Block specific sites — saying “please skip this site” is enough; it’ll use the block-list option.
• Adjust length/tone — “keep it under a 3-minute read”, “7 headlines plus a one-line comment each”.
• Day-of-week variations — instructions like “on Mondays focus on weekend developments; on Fridays add a weekly recap” can live in the same system prompt.

Advanced

The rest of this page isn’t required for everyday use. Read on if the output doesn’t match what you intended, or if you want to manage cost more carefully.

One-line summary of the tool combo

Web Search collects the information. Notify User handles both the chat message and the push notification in one shot — it delivers a single plain-text message, so keep the report compact enough to fit in one message. Canvas Create is optional, only if you want each day’s report saved as an in-app document.

Each search request is automatically broken into up to five sub-queries and returned as a summary with source links.

Cost guidance

Running once a day for 30 days roughly lands at:

• Low — Default model + web search + a short report. Plenty for casual curation.
• Moderate — Upgrade to a higher-tier model or widen the search scope. The report reads better; the daily spend rises accordingly.
• High — Adding Computer Use or Web Browser to handle login-walled sites or screenshots.

If you’re cost-conscious, keep the model in the lower tiers and keep the Notify User message short. See the Credits & Billing page for tier details.

Safety notes — recommended approval settings

• Web Search / Notify User / Canvas Create — set to Auto Execute. Because the agent runs while you’re not watching, you can’t approve each step by hand.
• Risky tools (skill install, team agent create, external file share, schedule create, etc.) — leave on the default Approval Required. This recipe doesn’t use them anyway.
• During autonomous runs, push notifications are sent only when you’re not already looking at that agent’s chat — getting no push while you have the chat open is the intended behavior.