The reel bot setup guide

You commented BRAIN. Here's the whole system.

What you're building: you DM any Instagram reel to a second account. Every 8 minutes a bot on your Mac checks that inbox, downloads the video, transcribes every word, and Claude titles it and files it into the right folder on your desktop. Every reel you save becomes a searchable text note. It costs $0 to run.

You don't need to know how to code. Claude Code builds the bot for you from one prompt in step 3.

Step 1: The burner account warning (read this)

The bot logs into Instagram with automation, and that's against Instagram's terms. This can get the account it runs on flagged or banned. Because of this, the bot needs its own throwaway account.

Make a fresh Instagram account with a new email. Don't connect it to your phone number or your main account. You DM reels TO this account from your main one. The bot only ever logs into the burner. Never point it at an account you care about.

Step 2: What you need first

A Mac, because the bot runs on your machine, not in the cloud. Homebrew installed. If typing brew in Terminal says command not found, install it from brew.sh first. Claude Code installed and logged in. If you don't have it, run npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code, then run claude once to sign in. And your burner account username and password from step 1.

Step 3: Paste this into Claude Code

Open Terminal, type claude, hit enter, then paste the whole prompt below and hit enter. Claude will ask for your burner login along the way and may ask permission before installing things. Say yes.

Copy the prompt

Build me an Instagram reel transcriber bot on this Mac. Work through these steps in order and check each one works before moving on:

1. Create a project folder at ~/reel-bot with a Python virtual environment. Install instagrapi and requests into it.

2. Install whisper.cpp and ffmpeg with Homebrew if they aren't already installed (brew install whisper-cpp ffmpeg). Download the ggml-base.en.bin Whisper model into ~/reel-bot/models.

3. Ask me for my burner Instagram username and password and save them to ~/reel-bot/config.json. This is a burner account, not my main one.

4. Write ~/reel-bot/bot.py that does a one-shot poll:
   - Log into the burner with instagrapi. Save the session to session.json and reuse it on later runs so it doesn't do a fresh password login every time. Set a delay_range of 2 to 5 seconds.
   - Approve any pending message requests so new senders come through.
   - Scan the most recent DM threads for messages that contain a reel or shared video. Handle both direct clips and reels shared as links that need resolving.
   - Track processed message IDs in a local SQLite database (reels.db) so nothing gets transcribed twice.
   - For each new reel: download the video to ~/reel-bot/downloads, convert it to 16kHz mono wav with ffmpeg, and transcribe it with whisper-cli using the base.en model.
   - Then call the claude CLI headlessly with the haiku model to return JSON with a short plain-English title and a category. Categories: AI Setup, Business Idea, Recipes, General Knowledge. If the Claude call fails, fall back to simple keyword matching so the bot never crashes on that step.
   - Save a markdown note to ~/Desktop/instagram reels/<category>/ named after the title. The note includes the reel link, who posted it, who sent it, the caption, and the full transcript.
   - Log everything it does with timestamps.

5. Run the bot once manually while I watch, and fix anything that breaks. I'll DM a test reel to the burner first.

6. When the manual run works, set up a launchd job (com.me.reelbot) that runs the bot every 480 seconds and writes logs to ~/reel-bot/logs. Load it and confirm it's running.

7. Tell me how to check the logs, how to pause the bot, and how to uninstall the whole thing.

That's the entire build. On my Mac this took one afternoon the first time. With this prompt it's more like 20 minutes, and most of that is installs.

Step 4: Test it

DM any reel from your main account to the burner. Within 8 minutes a markdown note shows up in the "instagram reels" folder on your desktop, sorted into a category, with the full transcript inside. Open it and search your folder anytime with Spotlight or Finder.

If something breaks

Ask Claude Code. Seriously. Open the ~/reel-bot folder in a Claude session, paste the error from the logs, and tell it to fix the bot. That's how I maintain mine. The most common issue is Instagram challenging the login on a brand new burner. Log into the burner in your browser once, complete the check, and run the bot again.

I run something like this every week and post the builds here. Follow @billenri.md on Instagram so you catch the next one. And if you want a system like this built for your business, that's what I do.