A Telegram Chat That Runs My Instagram

Rochester, N.Y. I run a tech Instagram page, @21stcentury.sahil. Making one good reel by hand takes hours: finding a topic, writing, filming, captioning, editing, posting, answering comments. autoreel does everything except the filming. I still record myself, because that's the part people actually come for.

Every night at 3am a discovery job reads real community signals: YouTube feeds, subreddit RSS, GitHub and Hacker News. A Claude researcher turns that into 3 topic cards, each with sources and a full draft script in my voice, and sends them to me on Telegram. Every tool link gets fetched and checked in code before it reaches me.

My voice lives in a file called VOICE.md: rules, gold examples and sections the system writes itself after a learn pass. When I ask for a revision, it resumes the same Claude session for that script, so edits build on each other.

Once I send back a clip, the render pipeline takes over. It normalizes the video, gets word timestamps from faster-whisper, lines the captions up with the script, and hands everything to a Claude director that plans the scenes. Playwright grabs screenshots of real sites and logos. Music ducks under my voice. Remotion renders the result, and the reel comes back to Telegram with Post, Redo and Edit buttons.

The scene kit has 25+ scene types across text, data, UI and apps, and each video gets one random bright accent color. When none of them fit, the director can write up to 3 new components for a single video. Each one has to pass a still-render check before it's allowed in the reel. That verify loop is what lets me trust generated code in something that goes out publicly.

Posting goes through the Instagram Graph API. Each post also writes a row that feeds my link-in-bio site, an Astro app on Cloudflare Workers that counts clicks through a locked-down database function. A comment-to-DM autoresponder watches tool reels for the word TOOL, replies privately, and sends the link once the person answers. It can check whether they follow the page first, and that gate can be strict, soft or off.

It runs 24/7 on an always-on laptop with a self-hosted Telegram Bot API server in Docker. If Claude gets logged out, the bot tells me on Telegram instead of failing silently. Failing loudly is a feature.

The repo is public, about 11.6k lines of TypeScript and Astro. Everything it makes goes out under my name, which is why nothing gets posted until I tap Post.