Personal Loom

Personal Loom is a screen recorder I built for myself. It's my own version of Loom, without the pricing. Hit record, capture the screen, get a link I can send or come back to later.

It holds seventeen recordings today. It also carries its own measure of a good one: playable video, with a transcript and chapters. One recording out of the seventeen clears that bar. One.

The part that isn't ordinary is a rule I set in June. Everything I add has to reuse the recording I already made.

So clips reuse the recording. I select a range in the editor, or pick a chapter, and it cuts a new video with the transcript sliced to match, searchable the second it exists. I don't touch the original. A bad cut costs me nothing.

Search reuses that same transcript. I can ask the whole library a question and get back the sentence somebody said, linked to the moment they said it, and an AI layer on top can answer across everything and then name which recording it came from.

The heatmap reuses what the player already reports. A strip under the video shows which stretches got watched, and the transcript lines under a heavily rewatched moment tint darker than the rest of the page. The biggest drop-off gets a button. It opens the editor already scrolled there.

There's also a panel that tells me how long a video will take to watch before I press play, silence skipped and sped up, which the app can work out because it knows where the silences sit. It isn't doing new work. It's reading things it already had on disk.

All four lean on the transcript. How many of my seventeen recordings have one? Three. Twelve are stamped unavailable and two came back as errors, and eight of the seventeen were recorded in the browser and came out silent (no sound in them at all), so the better transcription model I switched on in July had nothing there to hear.

One piece breaks the rule outright, and I'm fine saying so. Stopping a recording. A small control floats over whatever tab I've switched to, and a browser add-on does the same job from the toolbar. It reuses nothing the recording made. It's about reach: Stop has to work from wherever I am, because I've switched tabs to demo the thing I'm recording.

Guessing how much of this gets used is easy. I opened the database and counted. Zero clips ever cut. One playlist, holding no videos. No comments, no reactions, no tags. One folder. Twenty-five views. The button that's meant to turn a watch into a click has logged zero clicks.

Most of what I've built sits unused. One person doesn't generate much to comment on or tag. The heatmap and the search are the two I'd open if the library were bigger, and they're waiting on recordings that haven't been made yet.

The transcripts do travel, though. Distribution Engine reads them to find the right clip to hang on a post, and the demo clips on two of these project pages came out of here.

Newest recording in the library is dated 28 July. I want to know whether that's the tool or the week, and the database can't tell me either way. Let me know if you keep something like this running for yourself, and what you open it for.