scout-sources

Answers "what video should we clip next?" deterministically instead of by vibes. Professional clip channels hunt outliers — videos performing far above their channel's baseline. The cheap keyless proxies, all available from yt-dlp:

• velocity 2 * log10(1 + views/day) — reach × freshness
• outlier min(10, views/subscribers) — 3x+ is real signal, 5–10x is strong
• engagement min(5, comments per 1k views) — talked-about-ness
• peaky min(3, 10 * stdev(replay heatmap)) — a spiky most-replayed graph means the video CONTAINS clippable moments; flat means evenly mediocre
• curiosity min(1.5, question/superlative framing in the title) — sources whose own title is a curiosity hook ("how come…", "richest woman ever") yield the cold-open question moments the pipeline now leads with

score = velocity + outlier + engagement + peaky + curiosity (see score.py).

Invoke

.claude/skills/scout-sources/scout-sources.sh [out.json] [query ...]

• out.json (optional): default work/_scout/candidates.json
• query ... (optional): seed searches; default reads niches.txt (channel analytics — humor pods + productivity/AI — plus visually-rich, question-driven niches: space, wealth, true-crime, nature, history)

Env knobs: SCOUT_PER_QUERY (12 results/query), SCOUT_SHORTLIST (20 full fetches), SCOUT_MIN_VIEWS (100000), SCOUT_DUR_MIN/SCOUT_DUR_MAX (900/10800s — long-form only).

Output

candidates.json with ranked candidates (url, title, channel, score + components, seen: true when work/<sha1(url)[:10]> already exists) and a ranked table on stdout. Feed the winner straight to start.sh <url>.

How

1. Parallel flat ytsearch per query — view_count/duration/channel only (one cheap call per niche).
2. Merge, dedup, drop live/short/low-view, keep top-N by views.
3. 4-way-parallel full yt-dlp -J per shortlisted id — adds upload_date, channel_follower_count, comment_count, heatmap.
4. score.py ranks and writes candidates.json.

NOT part of the per-video pipeline — run it before start.sh to decide what to feed the pipeline. Uses plain yt-dlp ytsearch (NEVER mcptube discover, which needs a forbidden LLM API key).