The machine was supposed to go off at six. It did not, and at about half past the owner was back with a question: there were clips sitting in review that came from no campaign, leftovers from the days when the tool fetched episodes itself. Should they be cleared? “Do it.” And with it, the vision restated in three sentences, in the pull quote. That paragraph now sits at the top of the project’s own description file.
The command
A builder shipped a command that clears non-campaign clips for a channel, with a dry run, a Health warning while any remain, and a fold on the Sources page.
What review found
The command was one-shot. It cleared what was there, but the tick could still pick a leftover clip up, Retry could resend one, Undo followed by Approve could bring one back, and a post already queued to the social scheduler could still go out. Four doors, each of which would have put a YouTube-era clip on a channel after the owner had said no.
The rule
Rather than guard each door, the rework put the rule where every existing gate already looks. A source that belongs to no campaign is held for good through the same mechanism that holds paused and removed sources: one rule in the database layer, pinned to the campaign-source column by a test so it cannot drift. Retry is refused and hidden for such clips. A second Health warning lists any that are already on YouTube or in the scheduler’s queue, for a take-down from the Calendar. Test fixtures across fifteen modules were moved onto a past campaign so the suite exercises the rule rather than dodging it.
Merged after one review round, with the full suite green twice. This is the commit the overnight run’s rollback tag points at.
Next under the vision
Not yet dispatched: watch a shared folder per campaign, so a creator’s files arrive without the owner adding each one by hand.