find-in-back-catalogue

Find it in the back catalogue

A podcast back catalogue is the one thing a general-purpose model cannot know. Everything here is read-only, so it is safe to run before any conversation about permissions.

PodMule holds two different views of the same recordings, and picking the wrong one is the main way this goes wrong.

Transcripts are the evidence layer

search_transcripts searches the actual words people said, as spoken. Reach for it when the answer has to be defensible:

• a verbatim quote, or the passage around one
• an exact timestamp — "where does she say that?"
• "which episodes discuss X" / "episodes about X"

Its matched_episodes field is the episode list. It is already deduplicated per episode, so it is the right thing to read back to someone asking "which episodes"; re-deriving that list from the individual chunk hits produces duplicates and a worse ordering.

A single chunk is usually too small to quote from — it starts and ends mid-thought. get_transcript_window expands a hit into the surrounding section with start and end timestamps, which is what an answer of the form "at 14:32 he says …" actually needs.

Not every hit is timestamped. A result with a null start_time_seconds matched the episode's written description rather than the recording, and no amount of expanding will give it a position in the audio. Treat those as "this episode is about that", not as a quote — asserting a timestamp that was never in the result is the one way to make this layer untrustworthy.

Knowledge is the synthesis layer

search_knowledge searches durable pages PodMule maintains per show: one page per episode, plus topic pages and guest pages that accumulate across the whole catalogue. Reach for it when the question is about the show's position rather than a moment in it:

• "what does the show think about X"
• a topic overview, or how a theme developed over time
• everything a recurring guest has contributed
• takeaways across the back catalogue

Results come back mixed: page_type: "topic" pages span the catalogue, page_type: "episode" pages cover one recording, and guest pages cover one person. For "what does the show think about X", the topic page is the answer and the episode pages are supporting detail — a topic page's summary names how many episodes it draws on, which is the fastest read on whether a theme is a recurring position or a one-off.