draft-clips

Draft clips from an episode

A clip in PodMule is a short piece of content hung off an episode, headed for social distribution. This skill turns a recording into a set of draft clips grounded in what was actually said.

Find the moments before writing anything

The transcript is the source. search_transcripts scoped to the episode surfaces candidate moments; get_transcript_window expands each hit into the surrounding section with timestamps, which is what tells you whether a moment stands on its own or only makes sense after three minutes of setup.

What makes a good clip is a self-contained turn: a claim, a story with a beginning, a disagreement, a number that lands. What makes a bad one is a moment that needs the preceding question to parse. The timestamps are the honest test — if the interesting sentence starts thirty seconds into a window that only makes sense from the top, the clip is the whole window or it is nothing.

Aim for a handful of strong candidates rather than an exhaustive list. Five clips someone will actually cut beats twenty they have to triage.

Write from the transcript, not around it

Each clip carries a title and a description. Both should come from what was said. A title that paraphrases the actual line is findable later; a title that describes the episode generically is not.

Record where the moment is — the timestamp belongs in the description, because whoever cuts the video needs it and nothing else in the clip record carries it.

Create them as drafts

create_clip needs the episode id and a title, and takes description, tags and an external link. Clips land in draft state, which is the right place to leave them: the person whose show it is decides what ships.

Confirm the set with the user before creating, and show them the titles and timestamps rather than a count. Creating ten clips someone did not want is a mess to undo one at a time.

update_clip revises one afterwards. schedule_clip moves a clip to authorised with a publish time — that is a publishing decision, so it needs an explicit ask, not an inference from enthusiasm.