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REPOProductivity

last30days: research what people actually said about a topic this month

A free research skill that searches Reddit, Hacker News, GitHub, Polymarket and more for the last 30 days, ranks what people engaged with, and writes one brief with links.

WHAT YOU’LL GET

A cited brief on a person, company, tool or trend from the last 30 days, before a meeting, a purchase or a piece of content.

WHO IT’S FOR

Owners and builders who want recent opinions and discussion on a topic without opening twenty tabs.

DIFFICULTY

Beginner

TIME

About 10 minutes to install

WORKS WITH

Claude Codex

Get the full file

The whole resource as one Markdown file for your notes or your AI workspace.

FREEOpen on GitHub

What it does

Search engines are good at old, polished pages. They are weak at what people said last week: the Reddit thread where users compare two tools, the Hacker News argument about a launch, the GitHub issues piling up on a library.

last30days, by Matt Van Horn, is a skill for your coding agent. The README describes it this way: it searches those places for the last 30 days, scores what it finds by how much real people engaged with it, merges repeats of the same story, and writes one brief with links. Reddit, Hacker News, Polymarket and GitHub work with no setup. More sources, such as X, YouTube and TikTok, need extra tools or keys.

Good uses: before a meeting with a company, before choosing between two tools, before writing about a topic, or to see which problems people keep hitting with something you plan to build.

I have an older version (3.3.0) installed on my machine; the steps below follow the current README.

What you need first

  • Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or another agent that supports skills.
  • Python 3.12 or newer. The README says the skill can set this up for you using a tool called uv.
  • Node.js if you use the npx install.
  • The skill is free, but it runs inside a coding agent such as Claude Code or Codex, which may need a paid plan.

Install (checked 30 Sep 2026)

Claude Code (the README's recommended route). Inside Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add mvanhorn/last30days-skill

then:

/plugin install last30days

Codex, Cursor and other agents. In a terminal:

npx skills add mvanhorn/last30days-skill -g

The -g installs it for all your projects. We ran the same command without -g on a throwaway project on 30 Sep 2026 (with -a claude-code -y to skip the questions) and it copied the skill into .claude/skills/last30days. We could not complete the plugin route on that throwaway setup because it had no GitHub login; that is a limit of our test setup, not a known problem with the plugin.

Use one install route per computer, or /last30days will show up twice.

First use

In your agent's chat:

What the README describes (we tested the install only, not a research run): on the first run a setup wizard offers to switch on more sources; you can skip it. Then it searches in parallel and writes a brief: the main themes, the strongest posts and comments with their upvotes or points, and links to each source. It saves a copy under Documents/Last30Days in your home folder.

After the brief, keep asking in the same session, for example "which of these complaints come up most?" The agent answers from what it just read.

To compare, name both: /last30days Tool A vs Tool B.

How it chains with other library skills

  • Save a brief you want to keep into your notes and let Second Brain Agent file it and check its claims.
  • For a short daily list of AI news instead of deep research, see AI News Picker.

Watch-outs

  • Licence: MIT.
  • Upvotes are not facts. A popular Reddit comment is an opinion. Check anything important against the original source before you repeat it to a customer or post it.
  • Browser logins. For X, one option is to let it read the login cookies from your browser. That gives the tool your X session. Only do this on your own computer, and skip it if you are unsure. To see what it would read and write before a run, the README describes a --preflight option.
  • Costs. The free sources cost nothing. Some extra sources use paid keys, such as ScrapeCreators after its free calls, or Perplexity. The README says it reads keys from your shell environment, its own .env file and, on a Mac, the Keychain, so a key you already set up can switch a paid source on without you adding anything for this skill. Before the first real run, use --preflight or ask the agent which sources are enabled, and approve any paid calls.
  • Your questions leave your machine. The topic you research is sent as search queries to the sources it uses. Do not put a client's name, a confidential deal or anything private into the topic.
  • Publishing is off by default. Its library feature can publish your briefs as a web page, but only if you add --publish, and that page is public. Leave it off for anything about clients.

github.com/mvanhorn/last30days-skill, by Matt Van Horn and contributors, MIT licence. This page is our own summary.

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