Most users never touch FUN_LEVEL. Default medium was shipping a stats
block but rarely a Best Takes block, and when it did it was below the
cluster fold where a synthesizing model had already stopped reading.
A 2,304-upvote Reddit comment ("WHAT?! I reached my monthly limit
just reading this post") on the 2026-04-17 Opus 4.7 run sat inside
cluster 11 and never made it into synthesis. Four coordinated changes:
1. render: promote Best Takes above the cluster list so the synthesizer
sees comedy before it anchors on cluster 1.
2. render: lower medium threshold from 70 to 55 (heuristic maxes at 80),
drop the two-gem floor to one-gem. Default now reliably emits the
block on typical runs.
3. rerank: score individual top_comments by upvote ratio to their parent
thread. A 2,304-upvote comment on a 300-upvote thread now outranks a
400-upvote comment on a 3,400-upvote thread, which is the viral-wit
signal. Handles both the LLM scoring path and the heuristic fallback.
4. render: merge scored comment gems into Best Takes alongside candidate
gems, sorted together. Comment lines show body + parent title +
r/subreddit or @handle + absolute upvotes.
5. SKILL: tell the synthesizer to quote at least two Best Takes entries
verbatim, with an example of the new comment format.
Plan: docs/plans/2026-04-17-001-feat-default-fun-surfacing-plan.md
🤖 Generated with Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) via [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code) + Compound Engineering v2.56.1
Co-authored-by: Matt Van Horn <455140+mvanhorn@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Support comma-separated API keys in SCRAPECREATORS_API_KEY with random
selection per run, distributing load across multiple free-tier accounts.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
PR #260 wired YouTube comment enrichment against
`/v1/youtube/video/comments` with `id=<video_id>`, but the endpoint
requires `url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<video_id>`. Every enrich
call was returning 400 "missing_parameter: you must provide a url", so
no YouTube items ever carried `top_comments`.
The SC transcript fallback (`_sc_fetch_transcript`) had the identical
contract mistake. It was latent because `_fetch_transcript` prefers
yt-dlp and the SC path only fires when yt-dlp is missing, but it would
have failed the same way on hosts without yt-dlp installed.
Switching both callers to `url=` surfaces a second issue in the
response parser: SC returns `author` as `{"name": "@handle", ...}` and
nests like counts under `engagement.likes`, not top-level. The parser
was reading `author` as a string and missing the nested likes, so even
after the param fix every comment would land with an object-shaped
author and 0 likes.
- `_fetch_video_comments`: send `url=` on both urllib and requests branches
- `_sc_fetch_transcript`: same
- Response parser: extract `author.name` when author is a dict, read
`engagement.likes` when top-level `likes` is absent, prefer
`publishedTime` / `publishedTimeText` for date. Legacy string-author
and top-level-likes shapes still work, so existing mocks are unchanged.
Verified live against api.scrapecreators.com: `_fetch_video_comments`
now returns fully-populated comments with real @handles and like
counts (e.g. "@JennyNicholson: ... (49000 likes, 2025-04-15)"). All
tests in youtube_yt/normalize/signals/render pass.
Plan: docs/plans/2026-04-15-002-fix-youtube-comments-scrapecreators-param-plan.md
🤖 Generated with Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) via [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code) + Compound Engineering v2.56.1
Co-authored-by: Matt Van Horn <455140+mvanhorn@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
* feat(normalize): pass YouTube top_comments through with Reddit-compatible shape
_normalize_youtube silently dropped top_comments after enrich_with_comments
populated them, so the downstream signals/render/entity layers never saw
YouTube comments. Map likes->score and text->excerpt so the existing
Reddit-compatible readers Just Work.
Shared _remap_comments helper will be reused for TikTok in a later commit.
* feat(tiktok): fetch top comments via ScrapeCreators when opted in
Mirrors the youtube_comments pattern: new env.is_tiktok_comments_available
gate (requires SCRAPECREATORS_API_KEY + tiktok_comments in INCLUDE_SOURCES),
tiktok.enrich_with_comments ranks posts and fetches via
GET /v1/tiktok/video/comments. Vote field is digg_count; text and user.nickname
come across verbatim. Pipeline calls the enricher right after TikTok search
when the gate is open.
Comment-fetch errors never crash the pipeline — the enricher returns an
empty list on 4xx/5xx.
* feat(normalize): pass TikTok top_comments through with digg_count->score mapping
Instagram uses the same shortform normalizer and has no comment fetcher
today, so the key is harmlessly absent there — no Instagram regression.
* feat(signals): add YouTube + TikTok top-comment score to engagement formula
Mirrors Reddit's 10% top-comment slot. Without top_comments present, the
formula reduces to views-dominant weighting; with a high-signal comment,
the item gets a meaningful bump (log1p(10k) ~ 9.2, weighted 0.10 = ~0.92
on the engagement score).
Updated the existing dominant-weight and missing-fields tests to the new
weights (0.45/0.32/0.13 for YT, 0.45/0.27/0.18 for TT). Views still dominate.
* feat(render): source-aware thresholds and vote labels for top comments
10 upvotes on Reddit signals community interest; 10 likes on a viral
TikTok is noise. Introduce per-source minimums (reddit 10, youtube 50,
tiktok 500) and native vote labels ('upvotes' for Reddit, 'likes' for
YT/TT). First-pass numbers — tune after live observation.
* docs: generalize top-comment quoting to YouTube + TikTok, add tiktok_comments opt-in
Synthesis instructions previously called out Reddit top comments only.
Now cover Reddit/YouTube/TikTok uniformly with source-appropriate vote
labels (upvotes vs likes), and explicitly frame YT transcript highlights
and comments as complementary signals. README and setup-wizard copy
document the new tiktok_comments INCLUDE_SOURCES token.
---------
Co-authored-by: Matt Van Horn <455140+mvanhorn@users.noreply.github.com>
Six source modules each defined an identical 8-line _sc_headers(token)
function returning {"x-api-key": token, "Content-Type": "application/json"}.
Moved it to http.scrapecreators_headers() and migrated all 33 call sites.
Affected files: reddit.py, threads.py, tiktok.py, instagram.py, pinterest.py,
youtube_yt.py. Zero per-source variation, zero behavior change.
Net: -40 lines. 1022 tests pass (15 pre-existing failures unchanged).
Live smoke test: reddit search returns 12 threads with full engagement.
When a tweet has no engagement metrics, _first_of() returns None for
every key, producing {"likes": None, "reposts": None, ...}. This
all-None dict propagates to signals.py where it is treated as "data
exists but is zero" rather than "no data available." Return None
instead when every engagement field is missing.
github.py _parse_date used naive string slicing (return iso_str[:10])
which accepted any 10+ character string as a "date." For input
"hello world" it returned "hello worl". Now delegates to
dates.parse_date() which validates the format and returns None for
non-dates.
Also migrated reddit.py and threads.py _parse_date to the shared
dates.parse_date(). Both previously reimplemented ISO-with-trailing-
offset handling (the .replace("Z", "+00:00") dance) and reddit.py
also had its own Unix timestamp branch. dates.parse_date() already
handles all of this, including the +0000 no-colon variant Reddit emits.
Preserved reddit.py's original falsy-check so 0 still returns None
(epoch 0 would otherwise parse as "1970-01-01", breaking an existing
test and changing long-standing behavior).
Added 4 new github tests for garbage rejection and offset variants.
All 1026 existing tests pass (15 pre-existing failures unchanged).
Added params kwarg to http.request()/http.get() that urlencodes a dict
into the query string. None values are dropped, ints and bools are
stringified, and params append correctly if the URL already has a
query string.
Migrated reddit.py to use this helper for all three ScrapeCreators
call sites (global search, subreddit search, post comments). Deleted
the try/import requests/except ImportError fallback and the paired
if not _requests: / else: branches. Six new http tests cover the
params-encoding behavior.
Net: reddit.py -70 lines. Behavior is identical - the existing http.py
urllib implementation already had retry logic, 429 handling, and
HTTPError types that are strictly better than the ad-hoc requests
branches we deleted.
99 reddit tests pass. Live smoke test on a real ScrapeCreators run
returned 12 threads with the same engagement data as before.
The module-level _cached_token was set once and never refreshed. AT
Protocol tokens expire after ~2 hours, causing silent 401 errors in
long-running watchlist cron sessions. Adds a 90-minute expiry check
using time.monotonic() and logs re-authentication.
Fixes#92
The dedup hot path recomputed normalize_text() 4 times per comparison
and recomputed item_text() on every inner-loop iteration. Pre-computing
n-gram sets and token sets into a _PreparedText cache cuts dedup time
by 6x (2.16s to 0.39s on 300 unique items).
Bird handle searches spawned one Node process per handle sequentially.
Now uses ThreadPoolExecutor so N handles run concurrently. Same pattern
applied to YouTube comment enrichment (was serial, Reddit was already
parallel) and the retry-thin-sources phase in the pipeline.
Clustering now pre-computes candidate text and uses prepared_similarity
for the O(n^2) grouping and MMR representative selection loops.
Minor: _is_wsl() cached with lru_cache, Bundle.add_items() uses
extend() instead of list concatenation.
End-to-end: 5.2s -> 3.7s (29% faster) on a typical 4-source query.
On WSL2, native Linux Firefox typically has no x.com cookies since users
browse in Windows. Chromium browsers (Edge, Chrome, Brave) encrypt cookies
with DPAPI/app-bound encryption, making them inaccessible without admin
privileges. Windows Firefox stores cookies unencrypted in SQLite, readable
directly through the /mnt/c mount.
The cookie extractor now detects WSL2 via /proc/version, locates Windows
Firefox profiles under /mnt/c/Users/*/AppData/Roaming/Mozilla/Firefox,
and falls back to them when Linux Firefox yields no results. Reports
source as "firefox-wsl" to distinguish from native.
Also fixes profile resolution priority: Install* sections (Firefox >= 67)
now take precedence over the legacy Default=1 flag, which could select a
stale profile on multi-profile installations.
Add Xquik (xquik.com) as a new X/Twitter search source that uses a REST
API with full engagement metrics (likes, retweets, replies, quotes,
views, bookmarks). Uses stdlib urllib only -- no new dependencies.
- scripts/lib/xquik.py: source module with search, parse, query expansion
- tests/test_xquik.py: 32 unit tests covering all functions
- env.py: XQUIK_API_KEY config and availability check
- pipeline.py: source registration and retrieve dispatch
- normalize.py: reuses _normalize_x (same item format as Bird)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
When Bird's JSON response is a raw array instead of an object,
json.loads returns a list. All callers use .get('items') which raises
AttributeError on lists. Wrap list responses in {"items": parsed} so
callers always receive a dict.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
* feat: INCLUDE_SOURCES config + TikTok/Instagram opt-in in NUX
- INCLUDE_SOURCES=tiktok,instagram in .env forces sources on for all
query types, bypassing the tier system
- NUX shows opt-in modal after ScrapeCreators key is saved: "Also
search TikTok and Instagram?" with honest call-usage warning
- Tier system preserved as default — override only when INCLUDE_SOURCES set
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
* fix: neutral call-usage copy — works for free and paid tiers
---------
Co-authored-by: Matt Van Horn <mvanhorn@MacBook-Pro.local>
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Add extract_transcript_highlights() that scores sentences by specificity
(numbers, proper nouns, topic relevance) and filters YouTube filler
(subscribe, welcome back, etc). Top 5 highlights shown as structured
bullets in compact output. Full transcript moved to collapsible <details>
block so the LLM reads highlights first, full text on demand.
SKILL.md updated to instruct the judge agent to quote highlights
directly in synthesis, same as Reddit top comments.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
TRANSCRIPT_MAX_WORDS raised from 500 to 5000 so the LLM gets the full
content of most videos (up to ~25 minutes). Removed the second 200-char
truncation in render.py that was reducing transcripts to a single sentence
before the judge agent ever saw them.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
When Cloudflare blocks requests to bsky.social or public.api.bsky.app
with a 403, the error was swallowed by a generic except clause and
reported as "Bluesky auth failed" - misleading users into thinking
their credentials were wrong.
Now _create_session() preserves the specific error in _session_error,
and search_bluesky() surfaces it. Cloudflare 403s get a clear message
about network-level blocks. Actual 401s say "Invalid credentials".
Closes#69
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Map prompt-oriented product searches and animation-oriented build searches away from the breaking-news default so source tiering and tiebreakers align with the benchmark topics.
Validation: uv run python -m unittest tests.test_query_type
This workspace uses GOOGLE_API_KEY as the canonical Google credential. Accept it ahead of the Gemini-specific aliases so the local evaluation harness can run without a separate GEMINI_API_KEY export.
Validation: uv run python -m unittest tests.test_env_project tests.test_evaluate_search_quality and a one-shot keychain-backed resolution check.
Add an optional local evaluator that compares a baseline revision against a candidate checkout, computes deterministic stability metrics, and can call Gemini for judged ranking metrics when configured.
The harness isolates child runs with a temporary HOME and a node-free PATH so historical revisions cannot trigger Bird browser-cookie auth during evaluation.
Validation: uv run python -m unittest and local smoke/full deterministic eval runs.
Score against original user intent on Reddit, remove the artificial low-end relevance floor, and make Polymarket semantics dominate generic market quality signals.
Also apply the relevance filter to Polymarket and update the affected cross-source tests.
Validation: uv run python -m unittest
Phase-2 Bird handle searches were still spawning Node without the injected AUTH_TOKEN/CT0 env. That left the search pipeline vulnerable to Chrome keychain prompts whenever a query drilled into X handles.
Pass the popup-safe subprocess env through those handle searches and cover it with a regression test.
Classify prompting and animation queries as how_to so the stack does not treat them as generic breaking news. Also keep X available for how_to and preserve YouTube/HN coverage for breaking-news and prediction queries.
Validated with uv run python -m unittest tests.test_query_type and the five-query local comparison run used for PR #65 review.
Update README, launch copy, and UI guidance to prefer popup-free AUTH_TOKEN/CT0 configuration, and keep X backend selection on the verified Bird or xAI paths.
Validation: uv run python -m unittest tests.test_env_project
- Remove duplicate detect_query_type from query.py (divergent 5-type version);
canonical 7-type version lives in query_type.py
- Fix reddit.py import to use query_type.detect_query_type
- Clean unused STOPWORDS/SYNONYMS/tokenize imports from youtube_yt, instagram,
tiktok, scrapecreators_x, bird_x after relevance consolidation
- Fix _relevance_filter default from 0.7 to 0.0 (items without relevance
should not silently pass the filter)
- Remove --dateafter from yt-dlp (returns 0 results for evergreen topics)
- Remove restrictSearchableAttributes from HN search (misses Ask/Show HN)
- Lower HN points filter from >5 to >2 (avoids filtering niche posts)
- Add error logging to select_openai_model HTTP failures
- Remove mise.toml and internal planning doc from repo
- Update module docstrings to describe current purpose, not migration history
- Update tests to import from canonical relevance module
- hackernews: use extract_core_subject instead of raw topic, add
points>5 filter and restrictSearchableAttributes=title to reduce
noise from URL-match and low-signal posts
- youtube: add --dateafter parameter to yt-dlp for server-side date
filtering (Python soft filter still handles fallback)
- reddit: skip opinion/review query variant for how_to/comparison
queries where it adds noise
- bird_x: add OR-group retry with compound terms before falling back
to word-dropping (uses X OR operator for multi-concept queries)
- query.py: add detect_query_type() and extract_compound_terms()
- bird_x: parse_bird_response now accepts query param and computes
token_overlap_relevance against tweet text
- reddit: _normalize_post computes relevance from query vs title+selftext
- hackernews: blends 60% Algolia rank + 40% token overlap + engagement
This makes the 45%-weight relevance factor in score.py actually
differentiate results instead of being a constant.
Replace duplicated STOPWORDS, SYNONYMS, _tokenize, and _compute_relevance
in four modules with imports from the shared relevance.py module.
Existing tests pass unchanged since modules re-export the functions
under the same names via import aliases.
Matt Van Horn