Hacker News Mention Monitor with Claude Code
Twenty-four sweeps a day, and on most of them the correct output is nothing at all. What makes the busy hour hard is that judging a thread means reading it: the item, the comment tree, the front page position, then a decision against a policy you wrote. Claude Code reads before it concludes, which is the whole ask here.
Watch it work before it's live
Run a staged conversation — no account needed. The agent handles it for real while a simulated world answers its tool calls; nothing touches real accounts, and nothing is actually sent.
Hourly sweep, Tuesday 14:00
The 14:00 tick fires. A Show HN posted 40 minutes ago is at 168 points and 74 comments, sitting fourth on the front page. The top comment, from user tkachenko, asks how self hosting compares with the incumbent, two people report that the docs link returns a 404, and a competitor's founder has replied twice in the thread.
Set up in minutes
Using this template drops you into a guided setup. It asks exactly this, nothing else:
Connect Hacker News
One sign-in. The agent acts through your account, scoped to what this template uses.
Connect Slack
One sign-in. The agent acts through your account, scoped to what this template uses.
Watch terms
Every term worth watching, in your own words: your product and company names, your domain, your founders' Hacker News handles, and the competitors you want to hear about. The agent searches exactly these, so include the spellings and misspellings people actually type.
Ping policy
What earns an immediate Slack ping versus a line in tomorrow's roundup, for example a front page story or a complaint thread pings while a passing mention waits, plus the channel and the hours you are happy to be interrupted in.
Runs on Claude Code
Preselected for this page — connect your Claude Code account during setup, or switch to NoClick's built-in models with one click.
Watch it handle a test run
A staged conversation against a simulated world — then it’s live.
Why Claude Code for this agent
Reads the thread first
Points and a title do not tell you whether a comment section has turned. The template forbids describing a thread's mood from the headline alone.
Holds a written policy
Your ping policy decides what interrupts you and what waits for the roundup. Applying that rule consistently across dozens of hits is steadier here than most places.
Before you fork
Is hourly too expensive for a thorough harness?
Empty sweeps are cheap because there is nothing to read, and the expensive hours are the ones where a thread genuinely blew up, which is when you want it read properly. If your product name is a common word, tighten the watch terms before touching the schedule. Every three hours is the second lever, and it costs you response time on a live thread.
Run it with a different agent
Put Hacker News Mention Monitor to work on Claude Code
Free to start. Guided setup, a test run against staged conversations, and it's live.