Devlog #2 — breakages, fixes, and where it stands

continuing from #1,
Because apparently the pipeline had more ways to die than i budgeted my mental piece for 😭 =_= 😭

pipeline breakages that made me feel cursed

a non-exhaustive list of things that broke autonomy (these are the majot ones, many more small things too):

1. claim SQL bug — null failure_code made healthy queued jobs invisible to claim_next_job. queue looked alive. nothing claimed. i checked daily upload limits, n8n, worker health… everything green. the bug was one boolean expression treating SQL NULL like false.
2. retry after login recovery did nothing — youtube was login_required, instagram already uploaded, admin hit retry, worker said “no platforms need upload” because login_required wasn’t in the retryable set. i fixed the session, clicked retry, watched nothing happen, questioned my life choices.
3. zombie uploading jobs — crash mid-instagram after youtube succeeded. status stayed uploading. claim blocked. daily limit logic counted the zombie as an inflight upload. cascade of sadness overflowed.
4. drive cleanup count lying — overview said “6 files need cleanup” and half were old cancelled junk. made the ops panel feel broken even when it wasn’t (fake failures T_T).
5. yt-dlp randomly failing on some instagram urls with “no video formats found.” not a glamorous issue. still ate an hour.

each time the dashboard looked calm and the logs were quiet for 30+ minutes, that was the tell. silence usually meant a stuck lock, not “everything is fine.”

how i actually got past it (atleast for the meanwhile)

i stopped trying to be clever and started treating the worker like a hostile roommate.

• if an upload hangs longer than ~12 minutes, kill it and mark that platform failed
• if a job is still uploading after the lock expires / goes stale, auto-recover it on the next claim instead of waiting for me to notice
• if studio shows Create and we’re not on an auth URL, we’re logged in — stop screaming about 2fa banners
• scrape share urls from anchors, inputs, and page text, because youtube’s dialog is allergic to consistent DOM
• keep secrets and playwright profiles off github. public repo + demo read-only login so people can poke the UI without yeeting my jobs

also: verify delay went from 30 minutes to 5 for local testing because waiting half an hour to learn the upload silently failed was making me insane.

where it stands

it kinda works. not “enterprise reliable.” more like “if my pc is awake and chrome profiles are healthy, videos move.” submit is public. admin dashboard shows queue / failed review / accounts. demo user can look, can’t smash retry/delete. real uploads still need my laptop + n8n and docker which runs on it.

frustrations that still remain (T_T) :
local dependency, playwright flakiness, platforms changing UI for sport, and the eternal fear that tomorrow’s youtube banner invents a new sentence that trips the detector again.

but i went from “i will paste this reel into six tabs” to “drop the link and let the queue cook.” for a broke-student compromise architecture, that’s the win i care about.

This devlog shows only 1hr, cuz actually 60-70% of work was done in previous timed devlog, but I hit the character limit.

try the demo

if you want to click around without breaking anything:

• url: https://project-ap-i.vercel.app
• username: ProjectAPIDemo
• password: ProjectAPI@13

submit page is public. dashboard demo login is read-only (you can browse, you cannot smash retry/delete/account buttons).

thanks for reading these long-ass devlogs. seriously fr !!
if you made it through both, you now know more about my chrome profiles than my friends do :)

Devlog #1 — shipping this without a VPS budget

ok so i will be honest about how this project actually felt to build, because if i write the clean “i learned so much” version nobody will believe it, so anyways lets move on ;)

Basciallyy, i started Project AP-I because managing short form content for three niches (memes, anime, sports) was eating my brain at very very fast rate.
Every day was the same monotonous loop: find an approved clip, download it, slap a watermark, write a caption, open youtube studio, open instagram, upload twice, pray nothing asks for 2fa. doing that by hand for multiple accounts is how you lose a whole evening and still miss one niche. i wanted a queue. drop the link once, pick the niche, walk away.
sounds simple, but fr it was nott 😭 +_=

the money problem / why everything runs on my laptop

my first instinct was “just rent a VPS, put chrome + playwright there, done.” then i looked at prices for a box that can actually run headed chrome without dying, plus storage for temp video, plus sitting there 24/7. for a student project that was a hard no. so i compromised.

So the architecture became weird on purpose:

• vercel = public submit form + admin UI (free, fine for that)
• supabase = source of truth for jobs / accounts / audit logs
• my trusty windows laptop = native worker with real chrome profiles + ffmpeg + yt-dlp
• docker n8n on the same laptop = cron that claims jobs and calls the worker

so the so called “cloud” part is mostly the website in my project sadly =_=. the actual factory is under my desk. if my pc sleeps, the queue sleeps. that sucks. but it meant i could ship real uploads without burning money i don’t have. i’d rather have an ugly local stack that works than a pretty architecture diagram and empty wallet :)

playwright almost made me quit

ngl browser automation for youtube studio + instagram is genuinely mean. docs make it look like page.click('#upload') and you’re done.
lemme give u a look at reality:-

-youtube throws a red banner that says turn on 2-step verification while you’re fully logged in, and my detector treated that like a login wall. i watched chrome sitting there logged in, create button visible, video already published… and the job still flipped to login_required. i wanted to throw the laptop.

• sometimes it does publish, then fails because it couldn’t scrape the youtu.be link from the share dialog. so the video is live on the channel and the database says failed. truly was a nightmare for me.
• instagram will hang mid-upload. worker restarts. job stuck in uploading forever. claim logic sees “someone is uploading” and refuses to take the next job. whole pipeline frozen for like an hour while five videos sit in queued doing nothing. i stared at the dashboard thinking n8n died. n8n was fine. one ghost job was holding the me at the edge of Cyberpsychosis (anime reference :D)

every “one more small fix” turned into another edge case. captcha? stop and mark login_required. real verify-it’s-you interstitial? same. security upsell notification? ignore it or you false-positive yourself into a corner =_=
i had to rewrite the challenge detector like three times until it stopped panicking at youtube’s “your account is at greater risk” banner.

and that was just the browser drama.
Since I have reached the charcter limit I will continue in next devpost.