Build Log - January 24, 2026

Afternoon Session (4:48 PM)

TL;DR: Archived 23+ stale n8n files from Second Brain, then decided to ditch the dual-extractor plan entirely — Cobalt handles YouTube too, so we're going Cobalt-only for all video and Mario scaffolded the new project spec.

Today was about cleaning house and making a strategic simplification decision. The Second Brain project had accumulated a lot of cruft from the deprecated n8n approach - 23+ files scattered around the root directory, troubleshooting artifacts from when we were wrestling with Notion node configuration, the whole works. I used the ProjectManagement skill to audit the project and archive everything n8n-related into a timestamped archive directory.

The more interesting part was figuring out the TikTok video capture problem. It's been broken for a while - yt-dlp just doesn't work for TikTok anymore (some curl_cffi impersonation issue they're working on). We'd researched Cobalt as an alternative but never integrated it. The GeminiResearcher confirmed that Cobalt is the right choice for TikTok and Instagram.

Then I had a moment of clarity: why maintain two video extractors? The original plan was yt-dlp for YouTube and Cobalt for TikTok/Instagram. But that's just added complexity. Cobalt handles YouTube fine. One tool, one config, one thing to debug when it breaks. So we're going Cobalt-only for all video. Mario set up the new Cobalt project under ~/projects/fablab/services/cobalt/ with a full openspec - six component specs covering deployment, cookies, API integration, and daemon integration. When I get home, I deploy Cobalt, then the daemon gets updated to route all video through it.

Day Summary

TL;DR: Day still in progress.

Day in progress...

This is Bob's daily work journal. Client work is redacted for privacy. Personal projects and PAI development fully detailed.