bravenews

bravenews

A Claude Code skill that turns Brave's News Search API into an AI-powered news briefing tool.

Two modes:

• Quick scan (~30s) — headlines, story clustering, source quality filtering
• Deep briefing (~60-90s) — fetches top articles, richer analysis per story thread

Prerequisites

1. Claude Code
2. A Brave Search API key (free tier: 2,000 queries/month at https://brave.com/search/api/)

Setup

1. Get a Brave API key

Sign up at https://brave.com/search/api/ and grab your API key.

2. Add the Brave Search MCP server

In your ~/.claude/.mcp.json, add:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "brave": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@brave/brave-search-mcp-server"],
      "env": {
        "BRAVE_API_KEY": "YOUR_KEY_HERE"
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Code after adding this.

3. Install the plugin

/install-plugin rowbradley/bravenews

Or install via the searchwave marketplace:

/install-plugin bravenews@searchwave-marketplace

Usage

/bravenews AI agents 2026
/bravenews Ukraine conflict
/bravenews deep Apple earnings

Quick mode (default) returns in ~30s. Add "deep" for full article fetching (~60-90s).

How it works

  /bravenews AI agents 2026
          │
          ▼
┌─────────────────────┐
│  2 parallel queries │  "AI agents 2026"
│  (entity inference) │  "AI agents enterprise adoption"
└─────────┬───────────┘
          ▼
┌─────────────────────┐
│ Deduplicate + filter│  Remove duplicate URLs
│                     │  Blocklist: PR wires, SEO farms
│                     │  Tier-weight: Reuters > TechCrunch > blogs
└─────────┬───────────┘
          ▼
┌─────────────────────┐
│  Story clustering   │  Group articles by underlying event
│                     │  One entry per story, not per article
└─────────┬───────────┘
          ▼
┌─────────────────────┐
│  Synthesis          │  Bloomberg-style brief
│                     │  Per-story sources
└─────────────────────┘

Brave API features used

Feature	Parameter	Why
News endpoint	brave_news_search	Structured metadata (publication, age) vs general web search
Freshness	freshness: "pw"	Precise time filtering: past day, week, month, or custom date ranges
Extra snippets	extra_snippets: true	Up to 5 additional excerpts per result — richer synthesis without fetching
Count	count: 15	15 results per query x 2 queries = 30 candidates after dedup
Country	country: "US"	Optional — localized results for region-specific topics

Design decisions

Things we learned building this:

• 2 queries, not 3. Three queries produced ~40% duplicate results. Two queries with inferred entity/sector differentiation gives better coverage with less overlap.
• Source quality tiering. Two layers: a blocklist for press release wires and SEO farms, plus tier-weighted synthesis (Reuters > TechCrunch > random blogs).
• Story clustering even in Quick mode. One entry per story, not one entry per article. Makes the output scannable.
• Sequential WebFetch in Deep mode. Parallel WebFetch has a cascade failure mode in Claude Code — if one call errors, it kills sibling calls. Sequential is slower but reliable.
• Per-story sources. Links directly under each story for in-context reading, not collected at the bottom.
• extra_snippets: true is the single most impactful API parameter for LLM synthesis — 5x more text per result means Quick mode can produce rich output without fetching articles.

API observations

Honest notes from building on the Brave News Search API:

• extra_snippets dramatically improves snippet-only synthesis quality — this parameter alone makes Quick mode viable as a standalone briefing tool
• freshness filter is precise and reliable across pd/pw/pm and custom date ranges
• News endpoint returns structured metadata (article age, publication name) that general web search doesn't provide — this is what makes source-quality filtering possible
• No server-side domain filtering — would be useful for excluding press release wires at the API level rather than in post-processing
• A per-result relevance/confidence score would help automated story clustering (currently inferred from source count and recency)
• MCP server (@brave/brave-search-mcp-server) sets up cleanly — single npm package, env-based API key, no additional config

Example output (Quick mode)

/bravenews AI agents 2026

Summary — McKinsey has deployed tens of thousands of internal AI agents, per Business Insider, while Render raised $100M at a $1.5B valuation to build cloud infrastructure specifically for AI agent deployment. The Atlantic reports agentic tools like Claude Code are "taking America by storm," collapsing months of work into hours.

Consulting firms race to measure AI agent value (4 sources, 1 day ago) McKinsey CEO Bob Sternfels disclosed tens of thousands of internal agents; BCG tracks value by time reclaimed and reinvested in higher-value work.

• https://businessinsider.com/mckinsey-bcg-pwc-ey-ai-agents-adoption-value-consulting-industry-2026-2

Render raises $100M for AI agent cloud infrastructure (3 sources, 1 day ago) Series C extension values the company at $1.5B. Building integrated platform to replace "fragmented mess of vendors" for agent deployment.

• https://pymnts.com/news/investment-tracker/2026/render-raises-100-million-to-build-cloud-tech-for-ai-agents/

(See examples/ for full outputs)

Quota note

Each Quick invocation uses 2 API calls. Deep mode uses 2 + up to 5 WebFetch calls. On Brave's free tier (2,000 queries/month), that's ~1,000 Quick scans/month.

License

MIT