schedule-drip

The selection suite's drip stage. The pipeline today is produce-only: it renders clips and stops. The human picks ~19 by hand, dies 37% of the time on topic, and the channel takes 7-day dark gaps while ~80 quality clips rot on disk. With no evergreen tail (86-100% of a short's views land in days 1-3), a dark day is permanent lost reach — the #1 unconfounded leak in the 28-day analytics.

schedule-drip is the deterministic greedy scheduler that fixes it. It consumes grade-clip's grade.json verdicts plus a checked-in topic scorelist and stages a daily drip into output/_toupload/<date>/. Staging-handoff only — it never uploads (there is no API key in the stack); a human posts from the dated folders.

Usage

schedule-drip.sh [output_dir=output]

Inputs

• Every output/**/*.grade.json (skips _preview / source / _toupload / _triage). The locked schema lives in SELECTION-SUITE-CONTRACT.md.
• topics.scorelist (checked in here) — one rule per line, <GO|HOLD> <regex>, matched case-insensitively against source-slug + title. HOLD is a denylist and WINS over an incidental GO substring (e.g. "focus" inside a productivity-death source's "stay-focused"). Default when nothing matches: HOLD (conservative).
• OPTIONAL output/upload-log.json — a list, or {uploaded|posted: [...]}, of already-posted clip paths / basenames / titles. Absence means "nothing posted yet" — never a crash.
• "Today" comes from the system date.

Algorithm (deterministic greedy)

1. Gate (GOLD-first): keep a clip only if tier==GOLD with no hard_caps, OR grade>=GRADE_MIN_UPLOAD with no hard_caps. A clip with any unfixed hard cap stays out of the drip until fix-cold-open repairs it.
2. Drop posted: anything matched in upload-log.json.
3. Rank by grade desc (then source, then path for stable ties).
4. De-dupe near-identical: same source + ≥0.7 title-token overlap → keep the higher grade, drop the rest (collapses the clip / clip-1.25x speed-up twins).
5. Topic verdict: GO vs HOLD from topics.scorelist.
6. Place GO first into the horizon, one day at a time, POSTS_PER_DAY per day, MAX_PER_SOURCE_PER_DAY round-robin across sources (the 53-from-one-source feed-fatigue fix — no day ever gets two clips from the same source).
7. Backfill dark days with HOLD clips only — a HOLD clip is never dripped ahead of a GO clip, only into a day that would otherwise be dark.
8. gap_warnings — any day still empty after backfill (the dark-gap alarm).

Output

• output/_toupload/<YYYY-MM-DD>/ per filled day: the staged clip (copy) + metadata.txt (lowercased title + #-hashtags from the matched GO rule and the source slug, plus #shorts #fyp).
• output/_toupload/schedule.json — {generated, horizon_days, posts_per_day, max_per_source_per_day, days:{date→[clips]}, gap_warnings, backfilled, drops}. drops records every not_schedulable / already_posted / dedupe_near_identical / horizon_full decision.

Idempotent: _toupload is rmtree'd and rebuilt every run — a re-run yields a byte-identical plan and never duplicates staging. Non-fatal: any error exits 0 without staging.

Knobs

Env	Default	Meaning
POSTS_PER_DAY	1	clips staged per day
MAX_PER_SOURCE_PER_DAY	1	per-source round-robin cap (feed-fatigue fix)
DRIP_HORIZON_DAYS	14	days to plan ahead
GRADE_MIN_UPLOAD	60	shared with grade-clip; the schedulable grade floor

Why new

There is no selection / scheduling step at all. This is the only skill that directly attacks the dark gap and the backlog rot — it turns "101 produced / 19 uploaded" into a multi-week daily drip with zero new source ingestion.