Maarten's Grant Seeker

An agent that scours the web for funding opportunities (grants, RFPs, RFIs) in coastal & inland flooding, flood resilience, flood risk mapping, and related fields — maintains a database of what it finds, sends a daily digest of new opportunities plus a top-10, and (later) shows everything on a website.

Status: proof of concept

scout.py is step 1. It runs Claude with the built-in web-search tool, finds current opportunities, and extracts a fixed set of fields per opportunity as validated JSON, then prints them. No database / cron / email / website yet — this validates the core before we build the rest.

Run it

Easiest (Windows): set your key once, then run the batch file.

setx ANTHROPIC_API_KEY "sk-ant-..."   :: one time; then open a NEW terminal
run.bat                                :: print results
run.bat --json out.json                :: also save raw JSON

run.bat finds the miniforge delftdashboard_dev Python automatically (override with set PYTHON_EXE=...), checks the key is set, and runs from its own folder so you can also just double-click it in Explorer. Any arguments pass through to scout.py.

Manual:

# 1. Set your Anthropic API key
#    PowerShell:  $env:ANTHROPIC_API_KEY = "sk-ant-..."
#    Git Bash:    export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...

# 2. (recommended) upgrade the SDK
python -m pip install -U anthropic

# 3. run
python scout.py                 # print results
python scout.py --json out.json # also save raw JSON

On this machine, python resolves via miniforge — e.g. C:\Users\ormondt\miniforge3\envs\delftdashboard_dev\python.exe scout.py.

Fields captured per opportunity

title, funder, one_liner, summary_paragraph, due_date, eligibility, budget, topics, source_url.

Edit the TOPICS list at the top of scout.py to retune what it hunts for.

Planned architecture (GitHub Actions)

• Daily cron workflow runs scout.py-style logic on GitHub's runners.
• Database = data/opportunities.json committed back to the repo (the runner is ephemeral; the repo is the persistence layer). Dedupe by URL.
• Daily digest: new-since-last-run + ranked top-10, delivered by email.
• Website: static page on GitHub Pages (note: Pages on a private repo needs a paid plan — alternatives: Netlify/Cloudflare Pages free tier, or publish only the built site).
• Reliability boost: pull structured sources (Grants.gov API, SAM.gov, EU Funding & Tenders, FEMA, RSS feeds) alongside open web search.

Cost

Free on GitHub Actions/Pages at this scale. Anthropic API ~cents–low single digits per daily run on Opus; less on Sonnet (claude-sonnet-4-6).