last30days Review: AI Agent That Searches Past Google

TL;DR

/last30days is an AI agent skill that researches any topic across Reddit, X, YouTube, TikTok, Hacker News, Polymarket, GitHub, and the open web in parallel — then has a judge agent synthesize what real people actually engaged with in the last 30 days. It’s the #1 trending repo on GitHub this week: 39,455 stars total and 11,732 new stars in the past seven days, with 5 of today’s top 10 trending repos being Claude skills (per X user @yieldhunter95).

The premise is sharp: Google aggregates editors; ChatGPT has a Reddit deal but can’t see X; Gemini has YouTube but not Reddit; Claude has none of them natively. Every platform is a walled garden — but you can bring your own keys and let one agent search all of them at once, score results by upvotes/likes/transcripts/prediction-market money, and merge it into a single brief.

Key facts:

39,455 GitHub stars (11,732 this week, ranked #1 trending repo)
Built by Mason Van Horn (/mvanhorn), with active contributions from /claude, /tmchow, /j-sperling, /dinakars777
Works as a Claude Code plugin, Codex/Cursor/Copilot/Gemini skill, OpenClaw skill, or claude.ai web skill — same SKILL.md spec
Zero-config defaults — Reddit, HN, Polymarket, and GitHub work immediately with no keys
Optional API keys unlock X, YouTube, TikTok via setup wizard (~30 seconds)
v3 pipeline has a Python pre-research “brain” that resolves people→handles, products→founders, names→GitHub profiles before firing a single API call
HTML brief export — --emit=html saves a self-contained, dark-mode, print-friendly file
Apache 2.0 — install with /plugin install last30days or npx skills add mvanhorn/last30days-skill -g

If you’ve been frustrated that LLMs answer with stale 2023 blog summaries when the real answer is in a 1,500-upvote Reddit thread from last week, this is the skill you’ve been waiting for.

Quick Reference

Field	Value
Repo	mvanhorn/last30days-skill
Stars	39,455 (11,732 this week, #1 trending)
License	Apache 2.0
Maintainer	Mason Van Horn (`/mvanhorn`)
Primary language	Python
Install (Claude Code)	`/plugin marketplace add mvanhorn/last30days-skill`
Install (anywhere)	`npx skills add mvanhorn/last30days-skill -g`
Sources	Reddit, X, YouTube, TikTok, IG Reels, HN, Polymarket, GitHub, Digg, Threads, Pinterest, Bluesky, Perplexity, web
Zero-config sources	Reddit, HN, Polymarket, GitHub
Engine	v3 — pre-research brain + parallel pipelines + judge agent
Trendshift rank	#21997 trending

Why This Matters: Searching People, Not Editors

Here’s the thesis the README puts bluntly:

A Reddit thread with 1,500 upvotes is a stronger signal than a blog post nobody read. A TikTok with 3.6M views tells you more about what’s culturally relevant than a press release. Polymarket odds backed by $66K in volume are harder to argue with than a pundit’s guess.

Every other AI search tool ranks by SEO relevance. /last30days ranks by social relevance — upvotes, likes, views, transcripts, prediction-market dollars. The unlock isn’t a better search engine. It’s bridging a dozen disconnected walled gardens with a single agent that has your API keys.

The README’s canonical example: you Google someone before a meeting and get their 2023 LinkedIn. You /last30days them and you get what they’re actually doing this month — recent X posts, podcast transcripts they appeared on, the Reddit thread where 569 people argued about whether they’re “a hero or insufferable,” and the 23 PRs they merged at 85% merge rate. None of it was on Google.

That’s the difference between stale training data and last-30-days truth.

How v3 Actually Works

The v3 pipeline (the current source of truth in skills/last30days/SKILL.md) has four interesting innovations:

1. Pre-research brain resolves entities first

Type OpenClaw and the engine resolves @steipete (Peter Steinberger, the creator), r/openclaw, r/ClaudeCode, and the right YouTube channels and TikTok hashtags — before any search runs. It’s a Python module built by /j-sperling that does bidirectional resolution: person→company, product→founder, name→GitHub profile.

The old v2 engine searched keywords. v3 understands your topic first, then searches the right people and communities. That’s why v3 finds content v2 buried.

2. A “fun judge” alongside the relevance judge

Reddit and X people are funny. The old engine scored only for relevance and buried the best stuff. v3 has a second judge that scores every result for humor, wit, and virality alongside relevance. Every brief now ends with a “Best Takes” section — the cleverest one-liners, the most viral quotes.

3. Cluster merging across sources

When the same story appears on Reddit, X, and YouTube, v3 merges them into one cluster instead of showing three separate items. Entity-based overlap detection catches matches even when the titles use different words.

4. Parallel comparison pipelines

/last30days OpenAI --competitors tells the hosting reasoning model to discover the top 2 peers via WebSearch (Anthropic, xAI), then fan out three full pipelines in parallel and merge into a 3-way comparison. The old “X vs Y” used to be three serial passes (12+ minutes). v3 runs one pass with entity-aware subqueries for both sides simultaneously — same depth, ~3 minutes.

Install in 60 Seconds

Claude Code (recommended — auto-updates via marketplace):

/plugin marketplace add mvanhorn/last30days-skill
/plugin install last30days

Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Gemini CLI, or any of the 50+ Agent Skills hosts:

npx skills add mvanhorn/last30days-skill -g

(-g installs globally for your user, available across all projects. Drop it to scope per-project.)

Then just ask:

/last30days Peter Steinberger
/last30days Nano Banana Pro prompting
/last30days OpenClaw vs Hermes vs Paperclip
/last30days Universal Epic Universe

That’s it. Reddit, HN, Polymarket, and GitHub work immediately. Run it once and the setup wizard unlocks X, YouTube, TikTok in another 30 seconds.

Real Code: Calling It Like an MCP Tool

For non-Claude-Code clients, the engine ships an MCP server. Wire it in via your standard MCP config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "last30days": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@last30days/mcp"],
      "env": {
        "OPENAI_API_KEY": "...",
        "XAI_API_KEY": "..."
      }
    }
  }
}

The optional .env config (referenced in the Skillkit walkthrough) lives at ~/.config/last30days/.env:

mkdir -p ~/.config/last30days
cat > ~/.config/last30days/.env << 'ENVEOF'
# Both keys are optional - skill works with WebSearch fallback
# For Reddit/web research (uses OpenAI's web_search tool)
OPENAI_API_KEY=
# For X/Twitter research (uses xAI's x_search tool)
XAI_API_KEY=
ENVEOF
chmod 600 ~/.config/last30days/.env

The script auto-detects what’s configured and reports mode at runtime:

Mode: both — Reddit + X + WebSearch supplementing
Mode: reddit-only or Mode: x-only — partial keys configured
Mode: web-only — no API keys, Claude does all research via WebSearch fallback

The fallback works. You don’t need keys to get value. But you’ll get richer results with them.

Exporting a shareable HTML brief

This is the killer feature for sharing with humans:

/last30days OpenClaw --emit=html

Or in plain language:

/last30days Cursor IDE for slack
/last30days Anthropic earnings export as html

The skill emits the synthesis in chat and saves a self-contained brief to ${LAST30DAYS_MEMORY_DIR}/{topic}-brief.html (defaults to ~/Documents/Last30Days/). Dark mode, print-friendly, no JavaScript, system-font fallbacks behind Inter and JetBrains Mono. Drop it in Slack, email, or Notion — no raw markdown leaks.

Source-by-Source: What Each Platform Tells You

The README’s table is the clearest part of the docs. The signals are deliberately different:

Source	The signal
Reddit	The unfiltered take. Top comments with upvote counts, free via public JSON. The real opinions Google buries.
X / Twitter	The hot take, the expert thread, the breaking reaction. First to know, first to argue.
YouTube	The 45-minute deep dive. Full transcripts searched for the 5 quotable sentences that matter.
TikTok	The creator reaching 3.6M people with a take you’ll never find on Google.
Hacker News	The developer consensus. Where technical people actually argue.
Polymarket	Not opinions. Odds. Backed by real money.
GitHub	For people: PR velocity, top repos, release notes. For topics: issues and discussions.
Digg	Curated story clusters from Digg’s AI 1000 leaderboard (~1000 high-signal AI accounts on X), no X auth required.
Threads / Bluesky	The post-Twitter text layer.
Perplexity	Grounded web search with citations via Sonar Pro.

Each source contributes a different kind of signal. The synthesis ranks by what real people actually engaged with — not what an SEO team optimized for.

Community Reactions

This isn’t hype manufactured by the maintainer. The signal is real:

#1 on GitHub Trending this week. 11,732 new stars in seven days. The README notes that “5 of the 10 trending repos on GitHub today are Claude tools” (via X user @yieldhunter95), and last30days-skill is the top of that list.
Trendshift listed it at #21997 as a fast-rising AI repo.
@itswilsoncharles: “You give it a topic, it scrapes Reddit, X, and the web for what people are actually talking about. Not old blog posts. Real conversations from the last 30 days.”
From How Do I Use AI: “Actual, opinionated, trend-aware context injected directly into your prompt.”
The contributor list itself is a signal: /claude is the second-largest contributor on the repo, alongside /tmchow (the maintainer behind several other top Claude skills) and /j-sperling (who built the v3 pre-research brain).

The repo is also visibly active — the v3 pipeline shipped recently, the README explicitly notes that SKILL.md is the source of truth and gets updated faster than the README, and community contributors keep adding new sources (Truth Social, Xiaohongshu/RED are in the engine with more on the way).

Honest Limitations

I’d be doing nobody a favor if I painted this as a finished product. Things to know:

You’re trusting the judge agent. The synthesis is an LLM ranking, and LLMs hallucinate. The brief is always a starting point — for high-stakes use cases, you click through the citations.
Without API keys, you’re in web-only mode. That still works (Claude falls back to WebSearch), but you lose X, TikTok, and richer YouTube transcript coverage. The full magic needs OpenAI + xAI keys (and your own usage budget).
Reddit’s public JSON is rate-limited and occasionally degrades to anonymous quotas. The engine handles thin-evidence runs gracefully, but a brief from a single Reddit page is different from one with 23 threads behind it.
30 days is a window, not a guarantee. Some platforms (Polymarket, GitHub) effectively pull more recent activity; others (YouTube) may surface older videos if the transcript matches. Read it as “recent” rather than a strict cutoff.
It’s a skill, not a SaaS. You run it in your agent harness. There’s no hosted UI (yet). If your team doesn’t already use Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or OpenClaw, the install path is more steps.
Cost adds up. Each /last30days run can fan out 10+ API calls across providers. The skill itself is free, but you pay your model + xAI/OpenAI tool-call costs.

These aren’t dealbreakers. They’re the trade-offs you make to get social-graph search at all.

Comparison: Where Does This Sit?

Tool	Coverage	Search angle
`/last30days`	Reddit, X, YouTube, TikTok, HN, Polymarket, GitHub, +more	Social engagement (upvotes/likes/$)
Perplexity	Web + indexed pages	SEO relevance + citations
ChatGPT search	Web + Reddit (via deal)	SEO + Reddit consensus
Gemini Deep Research	Web + YouTube	SEO + video transcripts

The thing nobody else does: searching the social graph itself with a judge that synthesizes across all of it. That’s the moat.

FAQ

Is it free?

Yes — Apache 2.0 license. You pay the LLM and (optionally) the OpenAI/xAI tool-call costs when you run it. Reddit/HN/Polymarket/GitHub work with zero keys.

Do I need Claude Code?

No. It works in any of the 50+ Agent Skills hosts via npx skills add mvanhorn/last30days-skill -g. That includes Codex, Cursor, Copilot CLI, Gemini CLI, OpenClaw, and claude.ai web. Claude Code is the most polished install path because of the marketplace auto-update.

Will it work with my own model?

The skill is model-agnostic — it just needs an agent harness that can call WebSearch and (optionally) web_search / x_search tools. The reasoning quality of your model affects the synthesis quality.

Is the Reddit/X data legal to use?

The skill uses public JSON endpoints (Reddit’s free public API) and authenticated tool APIs (OpenAI’s web_search, xAI’s x_search). You’re using each platform within its terms by using their official endpoints. It does not scrape behind logins.

How is this different from “just asking Claude with web search”?

Three things: (1) parallel coverage — Claude with web search only sees what its search provider indexes, which is mostly Google’s index. /last30days deliberately hits walled gardens (X, TikTok, etc.) that Google can’t see. (2) Engagement-weighted ranking — Claude treats a 5-upvote post the same as a 5,000-upvote post. The skill weights by engagement. (3) Pre-research entity resolution — the v3 brain knows that “OpenClaw” → @steipete → r/ClaudeCode before the search runs.

Does it work for non-tech topics?

Yes. The README’s examples include Kanye West (Wireless Festival, Polymarket odds), Universal Epic Universe (wait times, refurbishment schedules), and pre-sales-call research. The same engine that surfaces a 569-upvote r/ClaudeCode thread surfaces a 23-thread Reddit consensus about Genie+.

What’s `headroom learn` and `--memory`?

Different repo — that’s chopratejas/headroom, the token compression layer that often gets installed alongside agent skills. Worth a look if you’re already running heavy multi-tool agents.

Should You Install It?

Install if:

You run Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, or any skills-capable agent daily and you want current signal in your context
You do competitive research, customer discovery, pre-meeting prep, or trend analysis and Google keeps giving you 2023 blog posts
You’d rather pay $0.10 in API calls for a 30-second synthesis than spend 45 minutes manually scrolling Reddit + X

Skip if:

You only need editorial summaries — Perplexity or Gemini Deep Research will be lower friction
You’re in an environment that can’t run local agents with API keys (some enterprise setups)
Your topic of interest isn’t on Reddit/X/HN/YouTube to begin with — the engine is only as good as the source data

For my money — running tool research, founder profiles, and competitive comparisons every week — this is the most useful agent skill I’ve installed this quarter. The synthesis quality is real, the source diversity is real, and the v3 pipeline genuinely beats v2 by a wide margin.

Repo: github.com/mvanhorn/last30days-skill — give it a star, then /plugin install last30days and run it on your own name. You’ll learn something.