Papercut strategy

These notes decide what a reel says and why it holds attention. The other papercut skills decide how it is written, staged and built. The rules come from studying high-performing faceless tech reels and from reading platform insights after posting. Keep your own evidence in the series' research/analytics/.

Preflight

• Install: Minimal is enough. No library needed.
• Find the series folder and read its SERIES.md first. It holds the audience (who, level, regions to aim for and avoid), voice, palette and mascot notes, the visual style, the keyword log and what has worked so far. If it is missing, ask the user for those fields and write the file.
• For a competitor study: yt-dlp, ffmpeg and any speech-to-text tool. For an autopsy: the platform's insights numbers from the user.

1. Topic

• Re-skin proven winners. A topic that worked (for you or a competitor) in a new familiar format beats a new topic in a plain format. Example: a reel about running several AI agents as a council, remade as "a jury of 12 AIs puts your idea on trial".
• The viewer must be able to use the outcome. If they can't do anything with it, skip it.
• Something to give away: every winner promises a free skill, prompt, template, cheat sheet or setup by DM.
• Speed on a hot repo. The first reel on a trending repo takes most of the views. Ship within a day or two, on an angle the earlier reels didn't use (../papercut-hook/references/hook-patterns.md).
• Demand signals: competitor outliers (likes at 5x or more of their median), trending repos (stars per day), front-page threads, same-day launches. Save candidates to the series' idea backlog.

2. Format