ig-viral
The research skill. Everything else in this pack writes; this one goes and looks. Run it monthly, not daily. Formulas last a season.
One tool lives in this folder and it runs:
bashpython3 swipe.py captured.tsv --out ~/.claude/instagram/swipe.md
The one idea that makes this worth doing
Raw views are not evidence. An account with two million followers doing 400,000 views had a quiet Tuesday. An account with four thousand followers doing 400,000 views found something, and that something is copyable.
So everything here ranks on the outlier multiple: views divided by that account's own recent median. Anything above 3x is a signal. Anything below 1.5x is that account's normal day and it teaches you nothing, no matter how big the number looks.
Collect accounts within about 10x of the user's own size. A formula that works at 2M followers often works because it is at 2M followers.
Step 1: pick the accounts
Ask the user for 6 to 12 accounts, or propose them and get approval:
- 4 direct - same niche, same offer, slightly ahead.
- 4 adjacent - different niche, same audience. This is where formats get borrowed from before anybody in the niche has them.
- 2 to 4 outsized - much bigger accounts, for format only, never for cadence or tone.
Also ask them to open their own Saved collection. It is the fastest and most relevant corpus that exists and it is already filtered by their taste.
Step 2: go and look
Use whatever browsing tool this session actually has: an in-app browser, a browser extension connected to the user's own Chrome, or a computer-use tool. There is no API for this and there does not need to be, because the volume is small enough to read.
Rules that are not negotiable:
- Never log into Instagram on the user's behalf and never ask for a password. If a page needs a login, the user is the one who is already logged in. Drive their browser with them present, or ask them to paste.
- This is reading, not scraping. Ten accounts, a dozen reels each, at human speed. Automated collection at volume violates Instagram's Terms of Use and gets accounts action-blocked. Do not build a crawler, do not use a scraping service, and do not loop this in the background.
- Copy the formula, never the video. The hook shape, the structure, the length, the pattern of cuts. Not their script, not their voice, not their edit. Attribute every row in the swipe file to the account it came from.
What to capture per reel, in the creator's own words:
| field | notes |
|---|---|
| account | handle |
| followers | from the profile |
| median | eyeball the last 12 reels and take the middle view count |
| views | this reel |
| hook | the first line, spoken or on screen, verbatim including bad grammar |
| on-screen | the first text card, if different |
| length | seconds |
| cta | what they asked for at the end |
Median is the important one. Without it you are back to ranking by follower count, which is the thing this skill exists to stop.
When Instagram will not show you enough: the same hook grammar runs on YouTube Shorts, where view counts and transcripts are public and no login is involved. It is a legitimate second corpus, and the spoken hook is easier to get:
bash# view counts for a channel's shorts python3 -m yt_dlp --flat-playlist --playlist-end 40 -J \ "https://www.youtube.com/@HANDLE/shorts" > channel.json # the spoken first line of one short, from its auto-captions python3 -m yt_dlp --skip-download --write-auto-subs --sub-langs "en.*" \ --sub-format json3 -o hook "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID"
Take every caption word with a timestamp under 3.0 seconds. That is the hook, as said, not as written.
Step 3: rank it
Fill a tab-separated file with a header row and run the script:
account followers median views hook @someone 48000 11000 412000 nobody tells you your first 30 reels are supposed to flop
bashpython3 swipe.py captured.tsv --out ~/.claude/instagram/swipe.md
It computes the outlier multiple, names the hook formula using the same 26
formulas /ig-reel writes from, scores each hook with hookscore.py, and
prints what separates the top third from the bottom third.
Step 4: say what it means, carefully
Report three things and no more:
- Which formulas over-index in the top third, with counts. Two formulas appearing four times each across six accounts is a finding. One appearing twice is not.
- What the top third have in common structurally that the bottom third do not: hook length, whether the payoff is visual, whether the first frame moves, where the ask is.
- The unclassified rows. Every hook the classifier could not name is
either noise or a formula that is not in
hooks.jsonyet. Read them by hand. This is the most valuable column in the output and it is the reason the script prints the count.
Then state the sample size and the confidence in plain words. Forty reels across six accounts supports a claim. Twelve does not, and saying so is the difference between research and horoscopes.
Step 5: turn it into something to shoot
For the top three formulas, write the user's version: their own story,
their own number, in the shape that is working. Hand each one to /ig-reel
with the formula id already chosen.
Never hand back "make a reel like this one". Hand back a hook line they could say tomorrow.
Output
SWIPE · 38 reels · 7 accounts · baseline: account median OUTLIERS (above 3x) 38.4x hook 86 #3 Nobody Tells You @acct_a 412,000 (median 10,700) 11.2x hook 79 #9 The Steal @acct_c 180,000 (median 16,100) ... WHAT IS OVER-INDEXING #3 Nobody Tells You x5 in the top third, 0 in the bottom #2 Negative Command x4 median hook length 8 words up top, 19 at the bottom UNCLASSIFIED (6) Two of these are the same shape and it is not in hooks.json: a hook that opens on someone else's comment read out loud. Worth adding. YOUR VERSION #3 "Nobody tells you the first 20 proposals are supposed to lose." ...
Write the swipe file to ~/.claude/instagram/swipe.md. /ig-reel and
/ig-plan both read it, which is the point: after this runs once, the rest of
the pack is working from the user's own evidence instead of from defaults.
Nothing is posted, followed, liked or messaged by this skill. It reads.
