Add Shorts Studio — autonomous YouTube Shorts company

[acunningham-ship-it]

What this company does

Shorts Studio is a three-agent company that operates a niche YouTube Shorts channel autonomously. It was battle-tested on ForgottenPages — a history Shorts channel now running at 660 avg views across 35+ auto-produced videos.

Why this is useful

Most indie AI YouTube channels get flagged by YouTube's 2026 synthetic-content detection because every video has the same TTS voice, same AI image style, templated hooks, zero human signal. This template ships with the anti-fingerprint kit:

• Voice rotation — deterministic rotation through 3–4 Kokoro TTS voices per channel
• Human intro bumper — prepends a real recorded human clip to every video with 0.3s crossfade
• Archival image mix — swaps 2 AI images per video with real Wikimedia Commons photos
• Ken Burns variants — 3 zoom/pan patterns rotated per video
• PIL-based thumbnails — channel-branded, replaces broken Canva exports
• Quality gates — hook + title validation, duplicate detection, pattern rotation
• Retention feedback loop — YouTube Analytics retention-at-3s feeds back into the quality gate

The three agents

• Producer (claude-sonnet-4-6) — end-to-end drop production; runs the pipeline, uploads to YouTube
• Strategist (claude-haiku-4-5) — weekly content calendar from analytics
• Analyst (claude-haiku-4-5) — daily retention pull; tells the Strategist which patterns are winning

Import + setup

Requires the companion pipeline repo at acunningham-ship-it/shorts-studio for the Python pipeline code (TTS, ffmpeg, YouTube upload). Users clone that, set up .env, then import this Paperclip template.

paperclipai company import https://github.com/paperclipai/companies/tree/main/shorts-studio

Verification

I ran paperclipai company import ... --dry-run on my Paperclip instance (server-side). Output:

Package
- company: Shorts Studio
- agents: 3
- projects: 0
- tasks: 0
- skills: 0

Plan
- company: create
- agents: 3 agents total (3 create)

Zero warnings.

About me

17yo self-taught. HamTek Media experiment — building a 4-channel Shorts operation before turning 18. This is the first template extracted from that work; more (WealthHacks finance niche, TrueCrime cold-case pivot) may follow once they prove out at FP's level.

Checklist

• COMPANY.md with agentcompanies/v1 frontmatter (name, slug, version, license, authors, goals, tags)
• README.md with getting-started + import command
• LICENSE (MIT)
• agents//AGENTS.md for each of producer, strategist, analyst
• .paperclip.yaml with adapter configs
• Scoped to one company (this PR adds shorts-studio/ only)
• Dry-run import passes clean

[hhg8840]

Is there a detailed manual?