mathias
d1a0b49fa9
The top-level guardrail for Tapir: the problem, the product, the principles
(local-first, standalone-first, attention-as-scarce-resource, data isolation),
who it's for (now / Future B / deferred Future C), and a staged, falsifiable
definition of success with Stage 0 ("useful to me") as the gate.
5.4 KiB
Tapir — Product Vision
One line: Tapir quietly watches the channels you already follow and hands you the substance of each new video — highlights and takeaways — so you can decide what deserves your full attention without watching everything.
The problem
People subscribe to far more YouTube/Vimeo channels than they can watch. Valuable videos go unwatched; time is spent watching videos that turn out not to be worth it. The signal is buried in hours of runtime. Existing "summary" tools are one-off, paste-a-URL affairs — they don't watch on your behalf and they don't respect where your attention and data should live.
The product
Tapir connects to a user's YouTube/Vimeo account, learns their subscriptions, and when a subscribed channel posts a new video, it:
- Detects the new video.
- Fetches its transcript (captions first).
- Summarizes it into highlights and takeaways relevant to the user.
- Delivers the summary to the user's store (and, optionally, to other sinks).
The analysis runs on a local-first AI stack. If the local stack cannot do the job reliably, the user may connect their own Claude / ChatGPT / Gemini account as a fallback — their key, their choice.
Principles (the guardrails)
- Local-first, user-owned. The default processor is the self-hosted stack. External AI is opt-in, per-user, with the user's own credentials. Tapir never silently ships a user's content to a third-party model.
- Standalone is the product. Tapir is a standalone service first. Feeding a personal knowledge base ("brain") is one optional sink, not the reason Tapir exists.
- Attention is the scarce resource, not compute. Every feature is judged by whether it helps the user spend less time deciding what to watch. Summaries exist to protect attention.
- Data isolation is a promise, not a feature flag. Each user's connected accounts, credentials, and summaries are separated. This holds from the first user, not "later."
- Respect the source. Captions where available; no fragile or ToS-hostile scraping in the core path. Where richer transcription is added later, it is a clearly-bounded, optional component.
Who it is for
- Now (the first customer): the maintainer — one person, their own subscriptions, summaries delivered to their own store and brain.
- Soon (Future B): a small number of known, trusted users (friends / beta) — each with their own account, isolated data, optional BYO-AI.
- Maybe (Future C, explicitly not built yet): a public multi-tenant service. Deferred until there is evidence of sustained personal use and real demand. Building for C before that evidence is a known anti-goal.
Definition of Success
Success is staged. Each stage has a single, falsifiable headline test. We do not advance to the next stage's ambition until the current stage's test passes.
Stage 0 — Useful to me (the gate)
Headline test: For four consecutive weeks, the maintainer reads Tapir-produced summaries for their own subscriptions at least weekly, and at least once acts on a summary (watches / skips / saves a video because of the summary).
- Captions-first summarization works end-to-end for the maintainer's real subscriptions.
- Summaries land in the maintainer's store and (optionally) brain.
- Local-first AI produces summaries of acceptable quality without manual intervention most of the time.
- This is the gate. Multi-user, BYO-AI-for-others, and any SaaS ambition stay deferred until Stage 0 holds. (Ties to the 2026-07-01 self-use check-in.)
Stage 1 — Useful to a few (Future B)
Headline test: At least one trusted user other than the maintainer connects their own account and, within their first month, keeps using it (returns to read summaries in ≥2 separate weeks) without the maintainer hand-holding each summary.
- Multiple users, each with isolated accounts, credentials, and summaries.
- A new user can self-connect a YouTube/Vimeo account and get summaries with no code change.
- Optional BYO-AI works per-user.
- No cross-user data leakage — demonstrable, not assumed.
Stage 2 — Trustworthy at rest (hardening, still Future B)
Headline test: Credentials (OAuth tokens, BYO-AI keys) are encrypted at rest via the homelab's existing secrets convention; a documented, rehearsed recovery path exists; and a deliberate isolation test (user A cannot read user B's data) passes in CI or a documented manual drill.
Non-goals (current)
- Public sign-up / billing / a marketing surface.
- Google OAuth app verification at production scale.
- Audio-download + speech-to-text transcription in the core path (a bounded optional component at most, deferred).
- Becoming a general-purpose video archive, player, or recommendation engine.
How we will know we are drifting
- We are building Stage 1+ machinery before the Stage 0 gate has passed.
- A user's content reaches a third-party model without that user's explicit, per-user opt-in.
- "Brain ingestion" starts dictating the architecture instead of being one sink behind an interface.
- The codebase acquires a second language or a parallel auth/secrets system that duplicates the homelab's existing Dex / ESO conventions.
This document is a guardrail. Changes to the principles, the staged definition of success,
or the non-goals are architecture decisions and must be recorded in DECISIONS.md.