What's next

Your first watch is running. Pick the thread that matches what you want next.

Make it more accurate

Writing a conditionThe single biggest lever on alert quality.

Tune precisionToo many alerts, or too few? A decision tree.

Source trustWhy an unrated site cannot raise a confirmed alert — and how to rate yours.

Feedback loopLabel alerts and watch your precision and recall.

Run it seriously

MonitoringHow you learn that something broke.

Backup and restoreYour run state lives in one database.

Costs and quotasWhat runs out first, and what happens when it does.

SecurityAuth model, secret handling, exposure surface.

Build on it

API referenceDrive Watcher from your own code.

ArchitectureLayers, ports, and the rule that keeps the core portable.

Add a collectorTeach Watcher a new kind of source.

Add a notifierTeach Watcher a new delivery channel.

Understand it properly

The engine is worth twenty minutes if you plan to rely on it: How it works → Decision rules → Failures and retries.

Three things that catch most people out

Reading these now saves an afternoon later.

Content is judged exactly once. Watcher remembers what it has already read, so improving a condition does not make it re-examine pages it already consumed. To test a change, create a watch with a new id. See What Watcher remembers.

An ungraded source cannot confirm anything. Watcher recognises only a small built-in set of domains. Everything else starts ungraded and is capped at the “unconfirmed” tier, however confident the model is. One trust rule for the site you actually care about usually fixes a whole class of surprise. See Source trust.

Your real check frequency is the slower of two clocks — the watch’s own cron, and how often the instance runs. A five-minute cron under an hourly job is an hourly watch. See Scheduling.

A good first week

1. Run one watch you care about and leave it alone for a few days.
2. When alerts arrive, label them 👍 or 👎 in the panel.
3. Read the run history for a watch that stayed quiet — confirm it is quiet for the reason you expect, not because collection is failing.
4. Then tune, once, using Tune precision.