Revenant Reader ☠

RSS, back from the dead. A local-first feed reader with a built-in MCP server, so AI agents can read your feeds too.

Built for Kiroween 2026 (Devpost, category: Resurrection) — resurrecting RSS, the technology Google Reader took to the grave in 2013, for the agent era.

What it does

• Add any RSS 2.0 / Atom feed by URL; refresh all feeds with one click.

• Unread counts, newest-first reading, full-text search across feeds.

• Mark items read — state persists immediately to data/feeds.json.

• MCP server (mcp-server/index.js) with five tools — list_feeds, search_items, mark_read, add_feed, unread_count — sharing the exact same store as the web UI. What the agent does shows up in the browser, and vice versa.

• Zero frameworks, one dependency (fast-xml-parser), no build step, no tracking, no account, no cloud.

Related MCP server: MCP RSS

Run it

npm install
npm start          # http://127.0.0.1:3000
npm test           # node --test tests/
npm run check      # node --check on every JS file
npm run mcp        # start the MCP server on stdio

First run seeds two feeds (Hacker News, NASA). Add your own from the sidebar.

How Kiro was used

This project was built spec-first, the way Kiro is designed to be used:

• Specs — three specs under .kiro/specs/ (feed-engine, reader-ui, mcp-server), each with requirements.md (user stories + acceptance criteria), design.md (architecture + sequence diagrams), and tasks.md (trackable checkboxes, marked done only when verified).

• Steering — .kiro/steering/ holds product.md, tech.md, structure.md (always-on) plus api-standards.md and testing-standards.md (fileMatch), so every Kiro session follows the same conventions without being told twice.

• Agent Hooks — .kiro/hooks/ automates the workflow: lint-on-save runs node --check on every saved JS file, test-on-stop runs the full test suite when a session ends, and spec-sync prompts the agent to keep spec task checklists honest after source changes.

• MCP — .kiro/settings/mcp.json wires the project's own MCP server (revenant) into Kiro, and .kiro/agents/revenant-librarian.json defines a custom librarian agent with that server + the steering files.

• Kiro CLI 3.1.0 is installed on the build VM (~/.local/bin/kiro-cli); sign-in (Google / GitHub / AWS Builder ID) is a human step — see below.

The specs, steering, hooks, and MCP config are all in .kiro/ at the repo root, as the Kiroween rules require. The directory is intentionally not in .gitignore.

What still needs a human

• Kiro account: sign in to Kiro CLI (kiro-cli login) with Google, GitHub, or AWS Builder ID (free). Then request the 4,000 free Kiroween credits on the Devpost Resources tab by Dec 1, 12:00 PM PT.

• GitHub repo: push this project to a public GitHub repo (open-source license included — MIT). The repo URL is what Devpost judges.

• Demo video: under 3 minutes, public on YouTube, showing the app working.

• Devpost submission: by Fri Dec 4, 2026, 2:00 PM Pacific — category Resurrection, plus the write-up on how Kiro was used.

Roadmap (from the specs)

• Per-feed lastError shown in the UI when a refresh fails.

• etag / Last-Modified support to skip unchanged feeds.

• MCP resources/list + resources/read, and a "morning briefing" prompt.

• Keyboard shortcuts (j/k to move, x to mark read).

License

MIT — see LICENSE.