Monitor Hacker News for Your Product Mentions with Codex

If developers are talking about your product on Hacker News, you want to know about it. Praise, complaints, feature requests, comparisons to competitors — it’s all signal. With AgentPatch connected, Codex can search HN for mentions of your product and give you a structured briefing without leaving the terminal.

Why This Matters

Hacker News threads move fast and the site’s built-in search isn’t great for monitoring. You could set up Google Alerts, but those are noisy and delayed. You could check manually, but that’s a habit that’s easy to drop.

Codex with hackernews-search gives you an on-demand way to check what’s being said. Run it at the start of your day, after a launch, or whenever you want a pulse check. It searches stories and comments separately, so you catch both top-level posts and mentions buried in discussion threads.

Setup

The AgentPatch CLI is designed for AI agents to use via shell access. Install it, and your agent can discover and invoke any tool on the marketplace.

Install (zero dependencies, Python 3.10+):

pip install agentpatch

Set your API key:

export AGENTPATCH_API_KEY=your_api_key

Example commands your agent will use:

ap search "web search"
ap run google-search --input '{"query": "test"}'

Get your API key from the AgentPatch dashboard.

Add AgentPatch to ~/.codex/config.toml:

[mcp_servers.agentpatch]
url = "https://agentpatch.ai/mcp"
bearer_token_env_var = "AGENTPATCH_API_KEY"

Then set your API key:

export AGENTPATCH_API_KEY=your_api_key

Replace your_api_key with your actual key from the AgentPatch dashboard. Codex discovers all AgentPatch tools automatically on next start.

Example

You’ve just shipped a new version of your developer tool and want to see if anyone’s talking about it on HN. You open Codex and ask:

“Search Hacker News for any mentions of ‘Raycast’ in the last 24 hours. Check both stories and comments.”

Codex runs the search with type: all and time_range: last_24h:

Found 2 stories and 14 comments mentioning Raycast in the past 24 hours.

Stories:
1. "Raycast 2.0 ships with AI workflows" (187 points, 94 comments)
   - Top comment thread is comparing the new AI features to Alfred's
     approach. Generally positive reception.

2. "Ask HN: What's your current dev setup?" (342 points)
   - Raycast mentioned 8 times in comments, mostly as a Spotlight
     replacement. Two commenters specifically mention the new version.

Comments in other threads:
- In a thread about developer productivity tools, 4 comments recommend
  Raycast. One compares it unfavorably to Raycast on Linux (not
  available).
- In a "What did you ship this week?" thread, someone asks if Raycast
  has plans for a Windows version.

No negative sentiment detected. The Linux/Windows availability gap is
the most common criticism.

Now you have actionable insights. You follow up:

“Search for comments comparing Raycast to its main competitors in the past week. Sort by relevance.”

Codex runs a second search and pulls comments where developers directly compare your product to alternatives. You can see exactly where you’re winning and where competitors are pulling ahead — straight from the people using these tools daily.

“Summarize the top 3 feature requests people are making for Raycast across those threads.”

Codex synthesizes across the results. Now you have developer-sourced feature priorities to bring to your next planning session.

Wrapping Up

AgentPatch connects Codex to Hacker News search and the full tool marketplace in one step. Search HN, check Google News, send yourself an email summary — same session, same connection. See what’s available at agentpatch.ai.

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