# BuildFeed

A pipeline watches 110 hand-picked channels — filtered, ranked, summarized, refreshed twice a day.

URL: https://jaketaylor.design/work/buildfeed

- Year: Nov 2025—Present
- Development: Claude Code
- Tools: Vite, React 19, Node.js, YouTube Data API, Claude Haiku, GPT-4o-mini, FireCrawl, Vercel, GitHub Actions
- Live: https://buildfeed.tech

![Abstract editorial mark — an organic blob shape with a hand-drawn ink outline in a screen-print register and a small terracotta dot, captioned 'Figure 01 — Shape of an Org' — for the BuildFeed case study.](https://jaketaylor.design/work/01-shape.svg)

[BuildFeed](https://buildfeed.tech) is a feed for the signal inside tech YouTube. A pipeline watches 110 hand-picked channels, filters each day’s uploads through four quality gates, ranks the survivors, and hands Claude Haiku the top ones to summarize. The channel list stays human-picked.

Video: BuildFeed promo — 200 tech videos dropped today narrow to the 61 that made the cut, the BuildFeed logo over 110 channels, one feed, a video summary with timestamped takeaways, a question asked across 2,154 videos with cited answers, and the end card: Quality over noise, buildfeed.tech. (https://jaketaylor.design/work/Buildfeed/buildfeed-brag.mp4)

## Scope at a glance

Started November 2025 with a handful of RSS feeds and a thesis: tech YouTube has a discovery problem, not a supply problem. Six months later: 110+ channels across AI, VC, startup, product, design, and tools. 300–500 raw uploads filter down to 80 curated videos per cycle. Refresh: twice a day. No human in the loop.

**By the numbers**
- **110+** Channels
- **80** Curated
- **2×/day** Refresh
- **1,039** Static pages
- **6** API units
- **$0.003** Per summary
- **<100ms** CDN load
- **2/wk** Auto-added

**Where visitors come from**

Video: Featured section on BuildFeed — a hero card plus a nine-video grid, each tile ranked by a rotation-aware scoring algorithm. (https://jaketaylor.design/work/Buildfeed/buildfeed_vid2.mp4)

*Featured: the top twelve, re-ranked twice a day with a seven-day rotation penalty so nothing gets stuck at #1.*

## Systems, not screens

Discovery runs on RSS, not the YouTube search API — channel feeds are free and unmetered, so the pipeline can watch 110 sources without touching quota. A twice-daily GitHub Action fetches the day’s uploads, runs them through a four-stage quality filter (viability gate, 0–100 engagement score, 35-point threshold, diversity cap), and scores the survivors for the featured pass. Old approach: `search.list`, 8,370 API units per build. New approach: six.

The top 12 get the expensive treatment. Claude Haiku pulls the transcript, writes a two-sentence TL;DR, tags topics, and extracts key takeaways with timestamps — about three-tenths of a cent per video. A seven-day rotation history penalizes anything that recently held the top spot, so the featured slot keeps turning over. The cache commits back to the repo on schedule; Vercel serves it static. A companion script pre-renders 1,039 HTML pages for crawlers the SPA alone couldn’t reach.

Video: Video detail page on BuildFeed — TL;DR, topic tags, and key takeaways with clickable timestamps alongside a synced transcript viewer. (https://jaketaylor.design/work/Buildfeed/buildfeed_vid.mp4)

*Video detail: TL;DR, topic tags, and timestamped takeaways, all generated from the transcript at $0.003 a pop.*