Tell Me More AI!

An AI-automated YouTube channel — now agentic.

This is the production pipeline for Tell Me More AI! — a YouTube channel powered by Hermes Agent.

The Evolution: From Script to Agent

Note: The original hard-coded Python pipeline has been moved to legacy/. The channel is now fully agentic.

Then (legacy/)

Script	What it did
ideagenerator.py	Searched Wikipedia for podcast topics
podcastgenerator.py	Used Selenium to generate NotebookLM podcasts
podcast2video.py	Generated slide-show videos + thumbnails
genai.py / wiki.py / media.py	AI helpers, Wikipedia scraping, media utils
yt.py / custom_thumbnail.py	YouTube upload, custom thumbnails

Now (hermes-agentic/)

A self-improving AI agent produces 3 Shorts/day:

1. Research → AI picks trending topics, checks dedup
2. Script → Curiosity-gap format (hook / build-up / reveal)
3. Visuals → Pexels videos + images with Ken Burns + crossfade
4. Captions → TikTok-style animated word highlighting
5. TTS → edge-tts narration
6. Upload → Scheduled YouTube Shorts with AI content flags
7. Improve → Weekly analytics feed back into the style guide

No human involved — the agent self-improves every week.

Quick Start

See hermes-agentic/ for the Shorts pipeline scripts.

These scripts are designed to be called by Hermes Agent, but can also be run standalone for testing and debugging.

True Crime Documentaries

The agent also produces true crime documentary videos (10-15 minute landscape format) using the same Ken Burns, Pexels, and TTS infrastructure as the Shorts pipeline.

See hermes-agentic/true-crime-builder/ for the full skill documentation.

Script	Purpose
scripts/build_tc_video.py	Full pipeline: TTS → Pexels → Ken Burns → Captions → Thumbnail
scripts/upload_true_crime.py	Upload with custom description, tags, thumbnail, playlist

Produces 1920×1080 landscape videos with:

• Ken Burns animated imagery from Pexels (100+ landscape photos)
• Cascaded crossfade transitions (disk-buffered, no OOM)
• Subtitle-bar captions with word-level timing
• Auto-generated thumbnails with title + TRUE CRIME badge
• YouTube playlist integration

Legacy Code

The original pipeline that used NotebookLM for podcast generation, Selenium browser automation, and slide-show video creation lives in legacy/. It is preserved for reference but no longer active in production.