Curated, not algorithmic — even when it's YouTube

Assurcast's promise, printed right on the homepage, is curated, not algorithmic. A human decides what's worth an auditor's attention. So there's an obvious tension in this work: I taught Assurcast to bring in YouTube, the most algorithmic medium there is.

The audit and assurance community has quietly moved a lot of its best explainer work onto video — PCAOB standard walkthroughs, SEC update briefings, "auditor's guide to AI" primers. That content belongs in a curated feed for auditors. The recommendation engine usually attached to it does not. The whole slice was about keeping the human and leaving the algorithm behind.

A video is not an article

The first surprise was how thoroughly the system assumed everything was text. A YouTube link arrived through the Assurcast pipeline, received an AI summary, and rendered as… a paragraph. The video itself was nowhere. So the first fix was the obvious one: embed the player at the top of the post, summary underneath, so a reader can watch without leaving. It uses YouTube's privacy-preserving `nocookie` domain, and the iframe passes through a strict allowlist — only YouTube's embed hosts survive the HTML sanitizer, so welcoming one kind of iframe didn't quietly open the door to every other kind.

The subtler problem was the AI. Pending video submissions kept coming back with generic, or summaries that were plain wrong. It turned out the model was being handed YouTube's page chrome — the footer, the nav, "About Press Copyright Contact" — because that's what a fetched watch page contains once you strip the scripts, and the description comes through empty. The AI was faithfully summarizing the page scaffolding, not the content. The fix was to feed it the video's *actual* title and description, pulled from the player metadata instead of the visible page. Same lesson I keep relearning: a model is only as good as the input you give it.

Curation should point back to the creator

A curated feed lives or dies on its relationship with the people and organizations it curates. Two small changes came out of that. The outbound button on a video story used the existing text which said "Read more" — the wrong verb for something you watch — so it now reads Watch on YouTube, carrying the creator's attribution and the path to subscribe and comment. And sharing a video story used to surface Assurcast's generic preview image; now it uses the video's own thumbnail. Curation that continues to send readers *to* creators, not around them.

Make it work everywhere, then reassure the human editing it

Embedding cleanly in the ingest path was the easy eighty percent. The rest was the editor fighting me. Stories created through the admin form or the public submission form weren't getting the embed at all, and the rich-text editor strips iframes out from under you on every save. So the embed is now injected server-side at every save path, idempotently — it self-heals if an edit ever drops it. 

The honest limit

I wanted automatic transcripts, so a summary could reflect what's actually said in a video, not just how its creator described it. YouTube has quietly shut off free server-side transcript access, and I wasn't going to hire a scraping vendor for a solo project. So the pragmatic answer: a contributor can manually paste a transcript and re-summarize on demand. This feature is limited to YouTube-only, length-capped, so the cost lands only on the handful of videos whose description doesn't do them justice. This isn't an elegant version. It's the honest one. 

How it got built

This was a dozen small, tracked slices over a few days, each its own kanban card, each shipping with unit tests and a written decision. Regular readers know the development harness by now: opinions written down, work in reviewable increments, an AI collaborator that never sleeps and documents everything, and a human who stays accountable for what ships.

Bringing YouTube into a curated feed sounds like one feature. It was really a dozen small decisions about respecting the reader, the creator, and the promise printed on the homepage.