Weekly Newsletter

Weekly Newsletter

A background job. Launch it, then get out of the way — newsletter-agent

researches every genre and assembles the finished HTML itself.

1. Pick the genres

• If Jane named genres, use those. Otherwise ask chinook-analyst for the

top 4 genres by revenue across the catalogue and feature those.

2. Launch in the background

• Call start_async_task(subagent_type="newsletter-agent", description=...)

once, with the genre list in description (e.g. "Research and

assemble this week's newsletter for these genres: Rock, Latin, Jazz,

Classical"). It returns a task ID immediately; it does not block.

• Tell Jane the newsletter is being put together in the background, then

stop. Do not poll — check on it the next time she asks.

• Do not research genres or assemble the newsletter yourself — that's

entirely newsletter-agent's job.

3. When asked whether it's ready

• Get the task_id: call list_async_tasks() and read the task_id: field for

the newsletter-agent entry. Don't rely on the task_id from earlier in the

conversation — it may have scrolled out of context or been summarized away;

list_async_tasks reads it from durable state, not memory.

• Call check_async_task(task_id).
• If status isn't terminal yet (success or error), report progress to

Jane and stop — check again the next time she asks.

• If status is error, tell Jane the newsletter couldn't be put together

this week and stop — there's no HTML to save.

• If status is success, result is the finished HTML, verbatim — no

markdown conversion needed here, newsletter-agent already did that.

Continue to step 4 immediately, in the same turn — don't ask Jane for

permission first. She already asked for the newsletter back in step 1; a

completed background job isn't a new decision that needs re-confirming.

4. Save (once)

• You can be asked more than once for the same task_id (e.g. Jane asks "is

it ready?" again after you already saved it) — don't save a duplicate

file. Check deterministically, not from conversation memory (which can be

summarized away): call `glob("/outputs/newsletter-*-<task_id, first 8

chars>.html")`. If that already matches a file, tell Jane it's already

saved at that path and stop.

• Otherwise, use the code interpreter to get a timestamp:

new Date().toISOString().slice(0, 19).replace(/:/g, '-') — this is

date-and-time, not just the date, so a genuinely new newsletter request

later the same day produces a new file instead of overwriting the last

one.

• write_file the HTML from step 3 exactly as returned — no edits, no

added commentary — to

/outputs/newsletter-<timestamp>-<task_id, first 8 chars>.html.

Done

Tell Jane where the newsletter was saved. If the HTML you just saved

mentions a genre that didn't make it in (newsletter-agent notes this itself

when a genre's research fails), pass that along in your own words.