Founders Transcript Archive

A local-first system for building, verifying, searching, and querying a private archive of Founders podcast transcripts. It combines a resumable archive pipeline with full-text and semantic retrieval, a command-line interface, an MCP server, and a Codex research skill.

Publication boundary

This repository contains the software, tests, and operating documentation. It does not contain podcast transcripts, indexes, audio, API credentials, or other generated archive data. Those artifacts live under the Git-ignored data/ directory and must remain private. Users are responsible for obtaining and using source material in accordance with the applicable terms and rights.

Capabilities

• Discover the canonical episode catalog from the public Megaphone RSS feed.
• Import transcripts through an explicitly capped, resumable Spoken workflow.
• Fall back to local Apple Silicon transcription when a transcript is absent.
• Store portable Markdown and JSON artifacts with a SQLite status/search index.
• Verify catalog coverage, checksums, and artifact integrity.
• Build a cited passage index with hybrid FTS5 and semantic retrieval.
• Query through the CLI or the founders-archive-mcp stdio server.

Requirements

• Python 3.12 or newer
• uv
• Optional: Apple Silicon and the local dependency group for local transcription

Setup

git clone https://github.com/jacksonxbxt/founders-transcript-archive.git
cd founders-transcript-archive
uv sync --extra research
uv run --extra research --with pytest pytest -q

Preview an archive sync without consuming transcript credits:

uv run --extra local founders-archive sync --dry-run --archive-root data

Build the private research index and run a cited query:

uv run --extra research founders-archive index --archive-root data
uv run --extra research founders-archive research \
  "maintaining control while financing growth" \
  --archive-root data --limit 8 --json

See PROJECT_PLAYBOOK.md for the complete operating workflow and safety constraints.

License

No open-source license has been selected. Public visibility does not grant a license to copy, modify, or redistribute the code or any underlying content.