The One Where I Built a Thinking Partner
I watch an unhealthy amount of YouTube videos. However, my only saving grace is that they're videos about technology, business, sports and geopolitics. So, I'd say I'm getting more useful information than not. I'm evaluating myself, so take this with a grain of salt.
Someone makes a good point about pricing, the latest technology, a development project, or how to talk to small-business owners, and I think, "That's useful." Then I close the tab. A week later, I remember learning something, but not what. I often don't take the time to think through how what I've learned can be applied to my benefit.
So I built a small system to fix that. It has two parts: a tiny MCP server that fetches a video's transcript, and a notebook of plain markdown files where an AI assistant and I think each video through against what I'm actually trying to decide. On the first day, I used it properly by processing eight videos.
The MCP server is about 200 lines of Python. The notebook is the part that matters. This post covers both, what broke along the way, and what I still can't tell you.