Diary of an Indie Hacker — Entry 8: Captions you can watch being born
Day eight: modes stop doing each other's work, honest failure states, and the first feature that feels alive.
Originally written November 13, 2025
Two fixes that sound small and aren't.
First: AI Subtitles and Reframe used to run the full clip-detection step before doing their job — which is like making someone sit through a tasting menu when they ordered coffee. Now each mode does exactly what it was asked to do, nothing more. And if transcription fails, the project is honestly marked failed instead of hanging in limbo pretending it might recover.
Second: the live caption overlay. AI Subtitles now shows captions appearing on the video while it processes — you watch your words land on the screen in real time. This is the first feature that feels alive. Everything before it was submit-and-wait; this is the first thing that performs.
Also shipped actual video processing for Reframe (it was mostly a UI shell before), auto-streamed the result, added Download buttons, and burned captions into subtitle exports — so the file you download looks like what you previewed, not a plain-video disappointment.
Shipped as v0.5.0. The version numbers are arbitrary, but this one earned it.
Next entry: the captions learn to move.
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