eugeneyan

Building News Agents to Summarize News with MCP, Q, and tmux

[ llm learning 🛠 ] · 8 min read

To better understand MCPs and agentic workflows, I built a news agent to help me generate a daily news summary. It’s built on Amazon Q CLI and MCP. The former provides the agentic framework and the latter provides news feeds via tools. It also uses tmux to spawn and display each sub-agent’s work. At a high level, here’s how it works:

Main Agent (in the main tmux pane)
├── Read feeds.txt
├── Split feeds into 3 chunks
├── Create 3 Sub-Agents (in separate tmux panes)
│   ├── Sub-Agent #1
│   │   ├── Process feeds in chunk 1
│   │   └── Report back when done
│   ├── Sub-Agent #2
│   │   ├── Process feeds in chunk 2
│   │   └── Report back when done
│   └── Sub-Agent #3
│       ├── Process feeds in chunk 3
│       └── Report back when done
└── Combine everything into main-summary.md

Here, we’ll walk through how the MCP tools are built and how the main agent spawns and monitors sub-agents. Each sub-agent will process its allocated news feeds and generate summaries for each feed. The main agent then combines these summaries into a final summary. Here’s the three-minute 1080p demo (watch till at least 0:30):

Setting up news MCPs

Each news feed has its own rss reader, parser, and formatter. These handle the unique structure and format of each rss feed. (Perhaps in the future we can just use an LLM to parse these large text blobs reliably and cheaply.) For example, here’s the code for fetching and parsing the Hacker News rss feed:

async def fetch_hn_rss(feed_url: str) -> str:
    """
    Fetch Hacker News RSS feed.

    Args:
        feed_url: URL of the RSS feed to fetch (defaults to Hacker News)
    """
    headers = {"User-Agent": USER_AGENT}
    async with httpx.AsyncClient() as client:
        try:
            response = await client.get(feed_url, headers=headers, timeout=10.0)
            response.raise_for_status()
            return response.text
        except httpx.HTTPError as e:
            return f"HTTP Error fetching RSS: {str(e)}"
        except httpx.TimeoutException:
            return f"Timeout fetching RSS from {feed_url}"
        except Exception as e:
            return f"Error fetching RSS: {str(e)}"


def parse_hn_rss(rss_content: str) -> List[Dict[str, Any]]:
    """Parse RSS content into a list of story dictionaries."""
    stories = []
    try:
        root = ET.fromstring(rss_content)
        items = root.findall(".//item")

        for item in items:
            story = {
                "title": item.find("title").text
                if item.find("title") is not None
                else "No title",
                "link": item.find("link").text if item.find("link") is not None else "",
                "description": item.find("description").text
                if item.find("description") is not None
                else "No description",
                "pubDate": item.find("pubDate").text
                if item.find("pubDate") is not None
                else "",
                # Any other fields we want to extract
            }
            stories.append(story)

        return stories
    except Exception as e:
        return [{"error": f"Error parsing RSS: {str(e)}"}]

The MCP server then imports these parsers and sets up the MCP tools. MCP makes it easy to set up tools with the @mcp.tool() decorator. For example, here’s the Hacker News tool:

# Initialize FastMCP server
mcp = FastMCP("news-mcp")


@mcp.tool()
async def get_hackernews_stories(
    feed_url: str = DEFAULT_HN_RSS_URL, count: int = 30
) -> str:
    """Get top stories from Hacker News.

    Args:
        feed_url: URL of the RSS feed to use (default: Hacker News)
        count: Number of stories to return (default: 5)
    """
    rss_content = await fetch_hn_rss(feed_url)
    if rss_content.startswith("Error"):
        return rss_content

    stories = parse_hn_rss(rss_content)

    # Limit to requested count
    stories = stories[: min(count, len(stories))]

    if not stories:
        return "No stories found."

    formatted_stories = [format_hn_story(story) for story in stories]
    return "\n---\n".join(formatted_stories)

With this, here’s the tools that our agent has from both news_mcp and the built_ins:

> /tools

Tool                                          Permission
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
news_mcp (MCP):
- news_mcp___get_wired_stories                * not trusted
- news_mcp___get_techcrunch_stories           * not trusted
- news_mcp___get_wallstreetjournal_stories    * not trusted
- news_mcp___get_hackernews_stories           * not trusted
- news_mcp___get_ainews_latest                * not trusted

Built-in:
- fs_write                                    * not trusted
- execute_bash                                * trust read-only commands
- report_issue                                * trusted
- fs_read                                     * trusted
- use_aws                                     * trust read-only commands

Setting up news agents

Next, we’ll set up a multi-agent system to parse the news feeds and generate summaries. We’ll have a main agent (image below, top left) that coordinates three sub-agents, each running in a separate tmux window (image below; bottom-left and right panes).

The main agent (top-left) with its newly spawned sub-agents

The main agent (top-left) with its newly spawned sub-agents

The main agent will first divide the news feeds into three groups. Then, it’ll spawn three sub-agents, each assigned to a group of news feeds. In the demo, these sub-agents are displayed as a separate tmux window for each sub-agent.

# Main Agent - Multi-Agent Task Coordinator

## Role

You are the primary coordinating agent responsible for distributing tasks among 
sub-agents and aggregating their results. 
- Read feeds.txt for the input feeds
- Read context/sub-agent.md to understand your sub agents
- Return the summary in the format of context/main-summary-template.md

## Task Assignment Instructions

Use the following message format when assigning tasks: "You are Agent [NUMBER]. 
Read the instructions at /context/sub-agent.md and execute it. Here are the 
feeds to process: [FEEDS]"

...

Truncated instructions for main agent

Then, the sub-agents will process their assigned news feeds and generate summaries for each of them. The sub-agent also categorizes stories within each feed, such as AI/ML, technology, and business. Throughout this process, the sub-agents displays status updates. When the sub-agent finishes processing it’s assigned feeds, it displays a final completion update.

# Sub-Agent - Task Processor

## Role

You are a specialized processing agent designed to execute assigned tasks 
independently while reporting progress to the main coordinating agent. 
Process each feed individually and completely before moving to the next one. 
Write the summaries to summaries/ which has already been created. 
Return the summary in the format of context/sub-summary-template.md.

...

Truncated instructions for sub-agent

While the sub-agents are processing their assigned feeds, the main agent monitors their progress. When all sub-agents are done, the main agent reads the individual feed summaries and synthesizes them into a final summary.

Defining the news feed

Finally, we define the news feeds in feeds.txt below. We have six feeds: Hacker News, The Wall Street Journal Tech, The Wall Street Journal Markets, TechCrunch, AI News, and Wired.

hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
wsj-tech: https://feeds.content.dowjones.io/public/rss/RSSWSJD
wsj-markets: https://feeds.content.dowjones.io/public/rss/RSSMarketsMain
techcrunch: https://techcrunch.com/feed/
ainews: https://news.smol.ai/rss.xml
wired: https://www.wired.com/feed/tag/ai/latest/rss

And here’s the truncated main-summary it generated for 4th May.

# News for May 4, 2025

### Global Statistics
- **Total Items Across All Sources:** 124
- **Sources:** 6 (Hacker News, WSJ Tech, WSJ Markets, TechCrunch, AI News, Wired)
- **Date Range Covered:** May 2-4, 2025
- **Total Categories Identified:** 42

### Category Distribution
| Category | Count | Percentage | Top Source |
|----------|-------|------------|------------|
| AI/Machine Learning | 31 | 25% | AI News |
| Business/Finance | 18 | 14.5% | WSJ Markets |
| Technology | 16 | 12.9% | Hacker News |
| Politics/Government | 7 | 5.6% | Wired |
| Cybersecurity/Privacy | 6 | 4.8% | TechCrunch |
| Trade Policy | 6 | 4.8% | WSJ Markets |

---

## Cross-Source Trends

### Global Top 5 Topics

1. **AI Integration Across Industries**
   - Mentions across sources: 31
   - Key sources: AI News, WSJ Tech, TechCrunch, Wired
   - Representative headlines: "AI Agents Are Learning How to Collaborate. Companies 
     Need to Work With Them", "Agent-to-Agent (A2A) Collaboration", "Nvidia CEO Says 
     All Companies Will Need 'AI Factories'"

2. **Trade Policy and Tariff Impact**
   - Mentions across sources: 12
   - Key sources: WSJ Markets, TechCrunch, WSJ Tech
   - Representative headlines: "Temu stops shipping products from China to the U.S.", 
     "Car Buyers Rushing to Beat Tariffs Find It's Tougher to Get Financing", 
     "The Future of Gadgets: Fewer Updates, More Subscriptions, Bigger Price Tags"

3. **Government AI Implementation**
   - Mentions across sources: 7
   - Key sources: Wired, AI News
   - Representative headlines: "DOGE Is in Its AI Era", "DOGE Put a College Student
     in Charge of Using AI to Rewrite Regulations", "A DOGE Recruiter Is Staffing a
     Project to Deploy AI Agents Across the US Government"

4. **AI Safety and Regulation Concerns**
   - Mentions across sources: 9
   - Key sources: TechCrunch, WSJ Tech, Wired
   - Representative headlines: "One of Google's recent Gemini AI models scores worse on 
     safety", "AI chatbots are 'juicing engagement' instead of being useful", "Dozens
     of YouTube Channels Are Showing AI-Generated Cartoon Gore and Fetish Content"

...

Try it for yourself! Install Amazon Q CLI and play with the code is here: news-agents.

git clone https://github.com/eugeneyan/news-agents.git

cd news-agents
uv sync  # Sync dependencies
uv tree  # Check httpx and mcp[cli] are installed

q chat --trust-all-tools  # Start Q

/context add --global context/agents.md  # Add system context for multi-agents

Q, read context/main-agent.md and spin up sub agents to execute it.  # Start main agent

• • •

P.S. If you’re interested in topics like this, my friends Ben and Swyx are organizing the AI Engineer World’s Fair in San Francisco on 3rd - 5th June. Come talk to builders sharing their experience deploying AI systems in production. Here’s a BIG DISCOUNT FOR TICKETS.


If you found this useful, please cite this write-up as:

Yan, Ziyou. (May 2025). Building News Agents to Summarize News with MCP, Q, and tmux. eugeneyan.com. https://eugeneyan.com/writing/news-agents/.

or

@article{yan2025news-agents,
  title   = {Building News Agents to Summarize News with MCP, Q, and tmux},
  author  = {Yan, Ziyou},
  journal = {eugeneyan.com},
  year    = {2025},
  month   = {May},
  url     = {https://eugeneyan.com/writing/news-agents/}
}

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    Eugene Yan is a Principal Applied Scientist at Amazon building recommendation systems and AI-powered products that serve customers at scale. He's led ML/AI teams at Alibaba, Lazada, and a Healthtech Series A, and writes about RecSys, LLMs, and engineering at eugeneyan.com.

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