Roadmap & Ideas

This project is designed to grow. Below is the living roadmap — a place to track ideas, capture impulses, and plan next steps.

Current state (v1.5)

• Full Go rewrite (from Python) — native macOS binary
• Pure Go transcript library (port of youtube-transcript-api)
• macOS menu bar app (menuet + native Cocoa via cgo)
• Unified Observation Window (3 tabs: Record, Review, Tags)
• 4 capture channels: YouTube (A), Screenshot (B), Impulse (C), Audio Import (D)
• Live VU meter with color-coded audio levels
• Local Whisper integration (subprocess)
• ER1 multimodal upload (image + audio + transcript)
• Offline retry queue with exponential backoff
• ER1 browser login linking (runtime context override)
• YouTube rate limit mitigation (cache, proxy, graceful degradation)
• CLI: transcript fetch, import, schedule, status, cancel
• Pre-release code review + docs consistency check
• GitHub Pages documentation
• macOS .app bundle with icon + Info.plist
• CI pipeline (vet + lint + test + build)
• Draft saving on cancel (~/.m3c-tools/drafts/)
• Tracking DB window with 2 tabs (Tracked Items + Source Files)
• Source Files: checkbox selection, sortable columns, folder path, creation date
• Bulk operations: Transcribe+Upload and Re-process Selected with progress bar
• Re-processing with doc_id reuse for ER1 document overwrite
• YouTube transcript preserved through voice recording (not overwritten by whisper)
• Clipboard-first screenshot: uses existing clipboard image without re-capture
• Optional audio: Store without recording (ER1 gets placeholder audio)
• Configurable timeouts: whisper up to 2h, ER1 upload up to 10min

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Completed: Go Rewrite

The full Python-to-Go rewrite is complete. See Go Rewrite Plan for the original migration plan and POC validation results.

Key wins over Python version:

• Single static binary (no Python/pip/virtualenv)
• Sub-100ms startup (vs 2-3s for Python)
• Native Cocoa UI via cgo (no Tkinter subprocess hacks)
• In-process audio recording via PortAudio (no PyAudio)
• Proper goroutine concurrency (no GIL)

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Completed: ER1 Integration

The ER1 integration is fully implemented in Go packages:

• pkg/er1/ — config, upload, retry queue, reachability check
• pkg/impression/ — observation types, tag system, composite documents
• pkg/whisper/ — local Whisper transcription
• pkg/importer/ — batch audio import from preconfigured folder
• pkg/menubar/capture.go — Store/Cancel with draft saving
• ER1 browser login linking with session persistence
• Offline retry queue with exponential backoff

Full requirements: ER1 Integration Requirements.

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Future work

Hardening & quality

• Gemini post-processing — tag-to-prompt pipeline for automated enrichment (R5)
• Login callback token validation — explicit signature/token verification
• Encrypted session file — at-rest encryption for ER1 session
• Integration tests for login callback — callback parsing and URL extraction
• Go 1.26.1 upgrade — fixes 4 stdlib vulnerabilities (GO-2026-4599 through 4602)

Transcript tools

• Batch fetch — fetch transcripts for a list of video IDs from a file
• Export formats — save transcripts as Markdown, Obsidian notes, or Logseq pages
• Transcript search — full-text search across all stored transcripts
• Summary generation — LLM summarization of transcripts (optional)

Menu bar enhancements

• Quick search — search transcript history from the menu bar
• Global keyboard shortcut — hotkey to trigger transcript fetch
• Auto-detect clipboard — detect YouTube URLs in clipboard and offer to fetch
• Auto-update — check for new versions on launch

Infrastructure

• Code signing — sign the .app bundle for Gatekeeper
• DMG packaging — distribute as signed DMG
• Homebrew formula — brew install m3c-tools

Large file refactoring (noted)

These files exceed 2000 lines and could benefit from splitting:

• cmd/m3c-tools/main.go (2330 lines)
• pkg/menubar/observation_darwin.go (2102 lines)

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Impulse capture

A scratchpad for raw ideas and impulses. No commitment, no priority — just capture.

Use GitHub Issues or edit this page directly to add new impulses.

Date	Impulse	Status
2026-03-09	Create gh-pages documentation site	done
2026-03-09	ER1 integration — standardize audio-checklist-checker pattern for YT videos	done
2026-03-09	Impression capture — speak about a video, bundle both transcripts into ER1	done
2026-03-10	Pre-release code review gates	done
2026-03-10	Mein Nutzerkonto menu item (ER1 profile page)	done
	Integrate with Obsidian for knowledge management	idea
	Channel-level transcript aggregation	idea
	Diff two transcripts (e.g., re-uploads, edits)	idea
	Webhook/notification when a channel posts new content	idea
	Transcript quality scoring (auto-generated vs. manual)	idea
	Browser extension for one-click transcript fetch	idea

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Contributing ideas

Have an idea? Capture it:

1. Quick: Open a GitHub Issue with the idea label
2. Detailed: Fork, edit docs/roadmap.md, and open a PR
3. Discuss: Start a GitHub Discussion in the Ideas category

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