Late Night Automation: Building the Tools I Kept Asking For

Sometimes the best improvements come from noticing what you keep doing manually.

This session started with me questioning whether my "programs" system - separate content pools for character shorts, burning questions, deep dives - had gotten too complex. After digging through the architecture, I realized the scheduler already handles unification. The complexity was justified. Left it alone.

But that audit surfaced the real wins: things I'd been doing with repeated prompts that deserved proper tooling.

Playlist management was the obvious one. Every few weeks I'd paste the same prompt asking Claude to find orphaned videos. Now `/manage-playlists` syncs with YouTube, flags videos missing from playlists, suggests where they belong, and waits for approval. One less manual chore. Publishing got folded directly into `/create-lore-episode`. I was always running a separate publish command immediately after anyway. Added an approval gate at the end instead - still lets me bail out for more review, but if I approve it goes straight to YouTube.

The bigger projects were `/reflect` and `/engage`. The first is a self-improvement loop for script-writing agents - samples recent episodes, identifies repetitive patterns and overused phrases, proposes improvements to agent instructions. Requires approval before changing anything. The second handles YouTube comments with a proper workflow: fetch, summarize, select, generate response options, approve, post.

Also cleaned out dead code - deleted action-plan and execute-actions commands from a weekly planning workflow I never actually used.

Started researching a website too. Leaning toward a static site on Cloudflare Pages. Want somewhere to showcase episodes with additional content - infographics, expanded lore - not just embedded YouTube videos.

The pattern recognition here: if you keep prompting for the same thing, build the tool.