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Pinchy

Create a Market & News Monitor

This guide walks you through creating a Market & News Monitor — an agent that searches the public web for current information and cites every fact with a source URL.

Prerequisites

Section titled “Prerequisites”
  • Pinchy is running (see Quick Start)
  • A web search provider is configured (the Pinchy Web plugin pulls its own credentials at runtime — no per-agent connection setup)
  • You are logged in as an admin

1. Navigate to "New Agent"

Section titled “1. Navigate to "New Agent"”

In the Pinchy sidebar, click the + button next to "Agents" to open the agent creation form.

2. Select the "Market & News Monitor" template

Section titled “2. Select the "Market & News Monitor" template”

Choose Market & News Monitor from the Marketing & Web category. The template pre-configures the agent with:

  • A monitor persona (concise, source-grounded, recency-aware)
  • The web-search skill — a workflow guide that teaches the agent when to search, when to fetch a full page, and how to cite sources
  • Read-only access to the public web through pinchy_web_search and pinchy_web_fetch

3. Enter a name and create

Section titled “3. Enter a name and create”

Give your agent a descriptive name — for example "Industry Watch" or "Competitive Pulse". Click Create.

The agent appears in your sidebar and opens its chat page. It is ready to use immediately — the web tools come from the Pinchy Web plugin, no per-user connection is required.

What this agent can do

Section titled “What this agent can do”
  • Search the public web for current information
  • Fetch the full text of specific public URLs
  • Summarize what it finds, citing every claim with a source link
  • Refuse to invent facts when no source is found

What this agent cannot do

Section titled “What this agent cannot do”
  • Access your private data, internal systems, or any connected integration
  • Send messages, post anywhere, or take any action outside this chat
  • Read any document or file on your Pinchy install

Example prompts

Section titled “Example prompts”
  • "Find recent funding announcements in our industry"
  • "Latest enforcement news on the EU AI Act for SMEs"
  • "Compare pricing for the top three project-management SaaS tools"
  • "Has [Competitor] released any product updates this quarter?"

The agent will return a short answer followed by cited bullet points and a one-line "What I checked" summary describing the queries it ran.

How it works under the hood

Section titled “How it works under the hood”

Market & News Monitor was the first template built on Pinchy's skill layer (master tracking issue #543). When you create an agent from this template:

  • The web-search skill body is materialized to the agent's workspace as skills/web-search/SKILL.md
  • OpenClaw 2026.6.x loads that file automatically into the agent's system prompt
  • The agent's openclaw.json entry lists skills: ["web-search"], which also excludes OpenClaw's bundled desktop skills (1Password, Apple Notes, ...) that are irrelevant for enterprise agents

The Email Assistant templates work the same way, attaching an email skill instead of web-search.

You can read more about how skills work in Skills, Templates, and Capabilities.