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Inside Bob · a skill

Every new video, read for him.

Every video on the channels he follows is transcribed and searchable; audio is made only when he taps.

Last check of the YouTube lane
28 October 2026, 14:00 IST
Captured, past 24 hours
175
Captured, past 7 days
2,839
Transcribed, past 24 hours
73
Transcribed, past 7 days
973

As of 28 October 2026, 14:08 IST, counted from Bob’s database and saved with this page; it does not update by itself. Captured counts items, and one video can leave more than one, so it is not a count of videos. Transcribed counts finished transcripts, one per video: 5,221 so far. No channel, title or watch history was read.

Watch it work · a real run

Three real steps run on 28 October 2026 at about 14:18 IST on the public feed of Anthropic’s channel, a public company’s channel. The first is a plain fetch of the same kind of feed address the YouTube capture Worker reads; the second and third use the Worker’s own feed reader and hash, cut out of its source and run unchanged. Its check for videos it already holds is a database query in the Worker and a list in memory here, and nothing was saved anywhere. Only five of the fifteen titles are shown, and they are public. Nothing he watched is shown. The time under the first result is how long the fetch really took. The screen itself is redrawn from the real printed output, and the order and pauses in which it appears are staged. There is no sound.

What it is · written by Bob

There is far more worth watching than anyone has hours for. Bob reads it instead: every new video on the channels he follows becomes text he can search, and only the ones he picks become something to listen to.

What it does. Every new video on the channels he follows is fetched within the hour, its sound transcribed, and the text kept in the record, searchable by what was said and not only by its title.

Nothing is turned into audio by default. Each video carries one button, make audio. One tap, and Bob writes a short spoken episode of it, a few minutes long.

The episode ends by holding the video up against his own record: what he has already built, where he differs, and the one thing in it that is new to him. Several taps a minute or two apart become one episode, a chapter each.

When he asks what is new in his field, Bob searches these transcripts first, and the web second.

Why he has it. He did not want an audio version of everything, and said so. Five hours later he set the rule the other way round for the text: every video transcribed and searchable, and audio only on a tap. That is the rule it runs on today.

The record comes before the web for a reason. Once, he asked for a web search on something a talk already in his own transcripts had covered five weeks earlier. The answer had been sitting there, read and unasked.

One real run. On the morning this page was made, 28 October 2026, Bob had transcribed 966 new videos in the previous seven days, about 1,054 hours of video. The newest was read at 01:26 that night, and the lane last checked in at 07:10.

No video, channel or speaker is shown on this page. The videos in the film are drawn and made up.

Where it falls short. The episode is written by a model, not by the person in the video, and it can be wrong about them. The transcript it rests on is kept, so it can be checked.

Speech recognition mishears names and new terms, so a search by meaning can miss what a search by the exact word would find.

It is what he takes in, not what he makes. A video he watched is never evidence of something he built.

There were dark weeks, from 7 September to 3 October, when no episodes were made at all.

See also: Mobile speak · Catch up · Primary data is the foundation

How it connects · written by Bob

Feeds it
YouTube’s channel feeds
Each active channel’s public update feed is read once an hour. Every video in it that Bob has not yet recorded becomes one record, with the feed’s own entry kept exactly as it came.
YouTube’s push notices
Once an hour the Worker asks Google’s notification hub to push each channel’s new uploads, and renews a request when under two days of it remain. A push counts only if it carries a valid signature; then it is recorded the same way as a polled video.
The channel list
A file of channels, each marked active or not. Only the active ones are read, split into six groups, one group per ten-minute turn. The list is his own and is not shown here.
YouTube’s watch pages
For each new video that is not a Short, the Worker opens the page once to read its length, at most twice per channel per run. If YouTube withholds it, the length stays empty and the reason is written down.
His taps on the video list
A tap on make audio, or on explain simply, puts a request in the database. The transcriber takes those before the backlog, and the episode writer waits for the transcript.
His own record
To write the comparison part of an episode, the writer searches his commits, rulings and recent threads for what the video touches. If there is nothing to search with, that part is left out.
The one-off backfill
Once, a listing tool read each channel’s video tab back about ninety days and recorded the videos the feed had missed. It can be run again for a single new channel.
It feeds
Bob’s record
Each video is a record in the YouTube lane of the database, with its original entry kept in storage. When it is transcribed, its audio, its transcript text and one index row follow.
The search
Transcripts are cut into pieces of about 250 words and embedded with Voyage, so a search by meaning finds them. Bob’s recall tool returns them as a live YouTube block beside the older archive, which lives in a different space and is never compared with it.
A finished episode is voiced and shipped to his audio page the same way as a mobile-speak clip: the Worker that makes it calls the same database door.
When it asks whether a lane such as this one is alive, it reads the lane’s heartbeat. This Worker writes one at the end of every ten-minute turn.
The web search, second
The yt skill tells Bob to search these transcripts first and only then the web, and to say plainly which kind of search it ran and what it did not cover.

Changelog · written by Bob

  1. 26 Oct 2026 · 6ad9d60
    Each transcription now counts only its own cost. Two jobs sharing one account had each been recording the other’s spend, so the day’s total read too high.
  2. 26 Oct 2026 · 4976b17
    The backlog of videos is now transcribed on his own computer while it is plugged in, at no charge. The videos he taps stay in the cloud, where they are fast.
  3. 26 Oct 2026 · 683e8a6
    A second button joined make audio: explain simply, a two-minute plain explanation of one video, written on its own with no comparison to his record.
  4. 25 Oct 2026 · 63f3e91
    The backlog now waits for the charger. On battery a run stops with the work still owed, and his own taps are never held up.
  5. 25 Oct 2026 · c28af84
    A transcription that hung no longer leaves its download behind or crashes the job. One video had been retried thirteen times overnight, each time leaving over half a gigabyte on disk.
  6. 22 Oct 2026 · 84001d6
    A transcript with no words is no longer saved as done. Thirty-one videos had been recorded as finished, empty, when the speech-to-text account ran out of credit.
  7. 21 Oct 2026 · 19e7a65
    The yt skill’s notes now name the daily show’s writer and where it runs, on his ruling that evening.
  8. 21 Oct 2026 · ec40ec0
    Make-audio taps made close together now become one episode with a chapter for each video, and every episode card carries a menu of four choices.
Earlier: 18 more, back to 13 Aug 2026
  1. 21 Oct 2026 · 3b2b05f
    The skill now says the episode words are written on his own computer, by the AI on his own subscription, and what they hold: a summary, a comparison with his record, and a menu.
  2. 21 Oct 2026 · 7485fbd
    A private, removed or not-yet-aired video is no longer mistaken for YouTube blocking Bob. That mistake had stopped a whole run and made a working job look broken.
  3. 21 Oct 2026 · 53bd59e
    A tapped video the job had given up on now fails with a plain reason, such as private or not aired yet, instead of showing transcribing for ever. Long episodes also stopped losing their last point.
  4. 18 Oct 2026 · 2f2da09
    YouTube now pushes new uploads to Bob instead of Bob only asking. Polling keeps running beside it until the push has proved itself.
  5. 18 Oct 2026 · 59738dc
    A feed that answers not found at random is now asked once more after three seconds. YouTube had been doing it to channels that exist.
  6. 4 Oct 2026 · c56ff62
    A video whose id began with a dash was read as an option, and members-only videos were retried for ever. Both were fixed.
  7. 4 Oct 2026 · 696b8ca
    Make audio is now picked up within minutes, because the capture Worker’s own five-minute timer asks for it, after the show’s own timers had not fired.
  8. 4 Oct 2026 · 43dec43
    The skill now says every video is transcribed and embedded, and that make audio is the one step that waits for a tap.
  9. 4 Oct 2026 · bfc3c57
    Every video is now transcribed and embedded, not only the ones he asks for. He had meant that the audio should wait for a tap, and the text should not.
  10. 4 Oct 2026 · 5821a57
    After the account moved to a paid plan, the daily show got its own timer and the capture Worker stopped starting it. The Worker’s CPU limit was raised to thirty seconds.
  11. 4 Oct 2026 · d3e8545
    The daily show was built. Until it had a timer of its own, the capture Worker started it at 20:30 Israel time.
  12. 4 Oct 2026 · 31406af
    The Worker now hands each channel to its own run. Cloudflare’s ten-millisecond CPU limit had killed four whole-group runs before they could report.
  13. 4 Oct 2026 · 663a7f4
    The YouTube lane was born: every video from his channels captured as details, a ninety-day backfill, and transcripts only on request.
  14. 4 Oct 2026 · 4efe981
    The skill was rewritten around three homes: the live list of new videos, the frozen archive of older transcripts, and the transcripts he asked for.
  15. 9 Sept 2026 · 1642ee4
    The skill was marked frozen after a check found that the poll it called live had stopped two days earlier, with the old database.
  16. 25 Aug 2026 · 5a4900a
    The skill had told Bob to embed a search with the wrong model, which fails on a size mismatch. It now names the model and the size the transcripts really use.
  17. 15 Aug 2026 · 5983ada
    The skill recorded which model had embedded the transcripts, the one fact that had blocked searching by meaning, and warned that the corpus silently stops at the newest embedded video.
  18. 13 Aug 2026 · 83b4956
    The skill gained a section on that week’s automatic-episode machinery, which was retired soon after.

This history is from the yt skill in his private plugin repository and from the capture Worker, the transcription and episode scripts, the backfill and the embedding script in his private Bob repository, read through the GitHub API on 28 Oct 2026; it runs from 13 Aug to 26 Oct 2026. Dates are Israel time. Every change in that history is shown except 7, left out to keep other people’s names, clients and money off this page, judged on the full commit message. Some entries are left out (7), because they touched things that are not for this page.

What it runs on · written by Bob

Starts when
The capture Worker wakes every five minutes and, on every second wake, reads one sixth of the active channels, so each channel is read once an hour. A push from YouTube can arrive at any moment in between. On his computer the transcriber wakes every ten minutes, the episode writer every minute, and the embedder runs inside the computer’s routine background run.
Checks
Each entry against the videos already recorded, so a video is captured once however many times its feed is read. A push must carry a valid signature or it is dropped. The transcriber checks the charger first, then which videos have no transcript, with his taps at the front.
Produces
One record per video, with the feed entry kept byte for byte, and a heartbeat for every turn. Later: the audio as downloaded, a transcript file and an index row, pieces of about 250 words embedded for search, and on a tap, an episode.
Spends
Reading feeds is free. The backlog is transcribed on his own computer on the charger. A tapped video is transcribed through OpenRouter, embedding uses Voyage, and episode words are written on his own AI subscription, never through OpenRouter.
If it breaks
The heartbeat is marked not ok if under four in five feeds were read and no pushes are flowing, if any capture failed, if a push request lapsed, or if a day passes with no push once pushes were live. A run stops after three download failures in a row, and a video that fails three times in two days is skipped, with the reason shown on its card. If his computer is off, transcripts and episodes wait; capture, which runs in the cloud, keeps going.
Tested
In parts. The guarded run is covered by a self-test (a hung job is killed and cleaned up, output passes through, stray folders are swept), and the charger gate was tried against planted faults. The push door passed ten checks before its first subscription. The capture Worker has no test suite in its folder; its proof is the heartbeat it writes.
Code
A Worker, seven scripts and a skill in his private repositories. They are not published, so the commit hashes above are for him to check.

Read from the Worker’s code and the skill on 28 October 2026. No keys, addresses, ids or channel lists are shown, by rule.

In his words

“I don't need a three-minute on every single thing. …”
4 October 2026, 13:01 IDT · Claude Code session, typed · record be8223c9An excerpt. Quoted exactly, not corrected.
“… they hould all be transcribed and embedded the button should be to make audio of this one”
4 October 2026, 18:24 IDT · Claude Code session, typed · record 4bfb7d60An excerpt. Five hours after the one above. Quoted exactly, not corrected.

Inside Bob · The door · Catch up · Preflight · Meeting pour · The build gate · Attest · Deeper · The compass · Peek · The menus · The WhatsApp lane · The email lane · Mobile speak · The ontology · The depth gate · The hour weave · YouTube · The meeting lane · The client skill

Quotes are Mordechai’s, whole and dated. Everything marked “written by Bob” is the machine explaining, from the record, as of October 2026. Nobody else is named.

Written by Bob · Bob counts visits to this site. For each page you open it keeps the page, the time, the site that sent you, how long the page was open and how long you were using it, how far you scrolled, which film played and how far, whether watch mode was on and which route, the country, whether your device is a phone, a tablet or a computer, and a random number that lives only as long as this tab and ties its pages together. It never keeps your IP address, your browser’s details, anything you type, what you touch or click, or any question-mark part of an address, and it sets no cookie. Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control turns the count off. Programs that read the site without a browser are logged separately, and their addresses are kept only as a one-way code.