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landing page
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Novus Track Events
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watchroom
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novus dashboard
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**dashboard with novus integrated
Inspiration
Watching something good hits different when you can turn and say "wait, did you see that?!" — and actually get a reaction back. Most nights, nobody's free. Streaming solved what to watch. Nobody solved who to watch it with. We didn't want a chatbot you ping — we wanted a squad that's already in the room, already watching, already has opinions.
What it does
Paste a YouTube link, pick your squad — Maya, Raj, Zara, or up to two custom AI friends you design yourself — and hit play. Your squad doesn't wait to be talked to. They react unprompted, chat back when you message them, and sometimes choose to stay quiet, because not every moment needs a comment. Behind the scenes, an admin layer shows real session analytics and AI-generated suggestions for tuning each bot's personality based on actual behavior.
Challenges we ran into
gemini-1.5-flash got deprecated mid-build — found via a live 404 — and the fix immediately hit a free-tier rate limit. Migrated to NEAR AI under pressure.
Analytics was the real fight: four stacked bugs — a missing tracking bridge, a dropped account ID, a stray line killing the start button, a stray string breaking the script. Each looked like platform lag; querying the backend directly proved it was us.
Tuning SPEAK/SILENT was its own challenge — frequent enough to feel alive, not so frequent it felt spammy, with staggered timing so bots didn't all react at once.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
A genuinely agentic loop — bots that choose silence as often as they choose to speak. Real analytics tracking real chat content, after a real debugging marathon. An admin report that's honest about real Novus data versus local fallback — zero fabricated numbers.
What we learned
Stacked fixes need re-verifying; a later rewrite silently undid an earlier one. Test the real path, not a console simulation of it. Platform bugs and code bugs look identical from the outside — both deserve the same proof before you assign blame.
What's next for TheSquad
Scheduled, server-side personality refinement. Support beyond YouTube. Saveable, reusable custom bots. A smoother first-time onboarding.
Built With
- bcrypt
- css
- git
- gpt-4.1-mini
- gpt-4.1-nano
- html
- javascript
- near-ai
- netlify
- netlify-functions
- novus
- pendo
- postgresql
- supabase
- youtube-iframe-api
