I Had Research and a Renderer. The Middle Was Missing.

Brett Ridenour Brett Ridenour · May 27, 2026

I went to the AITX monthly meetup at Antler VC on Tuesday. The kind of meetup where you’re standing with a beer and someone asks what you’re working on and the honest answer is “twelve things.” I gave the short version: blog is the source of truth, fans out to LinkedIn, becomes reels and TikToks, the whole pipeline runs through Claude and a handful of skills I’ve written.

Caleb — AI consultant, fellow attendee, deep in video automation — listened and then said the thing I’d been avoiding hearing for weeks.

“Where’s the prompt that turns the research into the script?”

I didn’t have one. I had research. I had a renderer. I had nothing in the middle.

What I actually had

Two strong endpoints and a void between them.

On the front end is a skill I use almost daily — /last30days. You hand it a topic and it pulls what people are actually saying right now: Reddit threads, X posts, YouTube comments, TikTok captions, Hacker News debates, GitHub activity. It’s grounding. It’s the difference between writing from memory and writing from current discourse. I ran it against the Remotion repo last weekend and ended up at 3 AM with an entirely new post idea I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

On the back end is production. Reel Repurposer and a small stack of producer skills that take a script and turn it into a finished short. The renderer doesn’t care where the script came from. It just needs a script.

The hole between them is the part where you take “here’s what people are saying about X” and convert it into “here is a 35-second hook + three beats + on-screen text + B-roll cues.” That’s not research and it’s not production. It’s a separate layer of thinking, and I had been doing it by hand in Obsidian every time.

Where’s the prompt that turns the research into the script?

— Caleb, paraphrased, at AITX

The fix isn’t a tool. It’s a skill.

The reframe Caleb gave me, in three pieces:

  1. /last30days outputs a research blob — current chatter, engagement counts, dominant frames.
  2. A prompt-engineering skill takes that blob and a target format, and emits a script spec: hook, beats, on-screen text positions, B-roll cues, voice direction.
  3. The script spec is the input the renderer was already waiting for.

The middle piece is a Claude Code skill. Not a SaaS product. Not an API I have to wire. A ~/.claude/skills/ directory with a SKILL.md and maybe two reference files. The contract on either side is text in, text out.

# What the pipeline looks like once the middle exists
/last30days "small-batch coffee roasters" > research.md
/script-spec --format reel-35s --research research.md > spec.md
# spec.md is what Reel Repurposer was always waiting for

I had been pretending the manual translation step in the middle was fine because the endpoints were so strong. They weren’t. The endpoints were strong because nothing connected them, which meant I only ran the pipeline end-to-end maybe twice a month. The work was technically possible and practically rare.

The shape of the pipeline now that I've drawn it

1
Research
/last30days pulls current chatter, engagement counts, dominant frames.
2
Script spec
New skill converts research into hook + beats + on-screen text + B-roll cues.
3
Render
Reel Repurposer takes the spec and produces the short. The renderer doesn't care where the script came from.

The thing the skill actually has to do

A script spec for a 35-second vertical video is more structured than I’d been treating it. After a couple hours of staring at scripts that worked and scripts that didn’t, the spec I want from the skill looks like this:

# Spec: small-batch coffee roasters — 35s reel

HOOK (0:00–0:03):
  Open on: hands grinding beans, shallow focus
  Text overlay: "Your $4 coffee subsidizes a $40 lie"
  Audio: ambient, no music

BEAT 1 (0:03–0:12): The setup
  Visual: pour-over close-up
  VO: "Most 'small-batch' is marketing language for a 200-pound roast."
  Source: r/Coffee thread (2.1k upvotes, 2026-05-12)

BEAT 2 (0:12–0:24): The reveal
  ...

CTA (0:30–0:35):
  Text overlay: "DM 'list' for my five Austin picks"
  Visual: smash cut to logo

That structure is the thing the renderer wants. Producing it by hand for every reel is the bottleneck. Producing it from a prompt with grounded research in context is the unlock.

What this changes about how I plan content

Once you can chain research → spec → render with one skill in the middle, the unit of planning is no longer “a post” or “a reel.” It’s a topic. You pick a topic, you run the chain once, and you fall out the other end with the blog draft, the LinkedIn carousel angle, and the reel spec. They share the same research substrate, which means they say consistent things across channels. Right now I can write a blog post on Monday and accidentally contradict it in a Friday reel because I researched the topic twice from two different starting points.

The bigger thing — the thing I’m still chewing on — is that I’d been adding tools to this pipeline for months. Higgsfield, Remotion, asciinema, a half-dozen producer skills. Tools were never the problem. The translation layer between thinking and shipping was the problem, and you can’t buy a translation layer. You have to write the prompt yourself.

The takeaway

I’m building the middle skill this week. The fact that it took a stranger at a meetup to point at it is a useful lesson on its own: I will defend a broken pipeline forever if both endpoints look impressive in isolation. The endpoints are the easy part to show off. The middle is where the work compounds.

Go look at the thing you keep doing by hand between two automated steps. That’s the skill you haven’t written yet.