---
name: autonomous-cron-curation
description: Best practices for designing autonomous cron jobs that require real-time accuracy and temporal awareness.
---

# Autonomous Cron Curation

This skill provides a framework for creating recurring agent tasks that rely on live data (weather, stocks, news) to prevent temporal drift and hallucinations.

## When to Use
Use this skill when designing a `cronjob` that:
- Requires current dates/times.
- Fetches real-time financial or weather data.
- Curates latest news/headlines.
- Must avoid relying on the LLM's internal training cutoff.

## Workflow for Robust Curation

### 1. Temporal Anchor (The "Date First" Rule)
LLMs have no internal clock. To prevent hallucinations:
- **Action:** Start every prompt by instructing the agent to determine the current date and time using a system check or web search.
- **Prompt Pattern:** "First, determine the current date and time. Use this specific date for all subsequent search queries to ensure real-time accuracy."

### 2. Toolset Alignment
Ensure the job has the necessary permissions to access the live web.
- **Action:** Enable the `web` (or `browser`) toolset in the cron configuration.

### 3. Source Enforcement
Prevent the agent from using "general knowledge" (training data).
- **Action:** Specify reliable sources (e.g., "Use Yahoo Finance for stocks," "Use a current weather API/site for forecasts").
- **Instruction:** Explicitly state: "Ignore training data; use only results returned from the current web search."

### 4. Recency Constraints
For news and headlines, "recent" is ambiguous to an AI.
- **Action:** Define a strict window (e.g., "Within the last 24 hours").
- **Verification:** Instruct the agent to verify the timestamp of the articles it finds before including them in the report.

## Pitfalls & Troubleshooting
- **Temporal Drift:** If the agent reports a date from 2023 or 2024, it has failed the Temporal Anchor step.
- **Generic Results:** If news is vague, the agent likely didn't use the date in the search query. Fix by requiring the date to be part of the search string.
- **Future-Dating:** Occurs when the agent guesses the date. Always force a search-based date confirmation.