shipped the first spoolcast video

first spoolcast video is done. 8 minutes, four acts, ~$3 in generation costs. rendered via the pipeline it's about.

the long part of the session wasn't making the video — the pipeline does that. it was finding out, iteration by iteration, where the pipeline didn't know enough about pacing. nine renders in. broll that played without setup got cut. a "you build things / it came out great / now what?" reveal-group got added because the jump from "you build things" to "getting attention is a separate job" had no emotional beat between them. the layers intro got rewritten from just naming the four to actually previewing them — what each does and how they connect. learned that when a line lands "too fast" after a tight-cadence group, extending the pause is the wrong lever — the fix is slowing the tts on that specific beat (speaking_rate 0.95 baked in, plays at remotion's 1.1x, nets ~1.045x — noticeably slower than the 1.1x surrounding it).

also ended up collapsing 13 rule files into 6, building an llm-based narration auditor (qwen 72b via openrouter, $0.03 per run, flags logical jumps + overweight beats), adding a zero-prior-context rule for thumbnails after the first thumbnail leaned on insider concepts. still open: actually uploading to youtube (needs google cloud oauth), a validator script, tagging the remaining ~50 chunks for the pipeline gate.