Turn the Instagram posts you save into notes Claude finds on its own.
You already capture reliably — share, tap your own account, done. What fails is everything after: a URL tells you nothing about what was in the post, so you never triage it, and nothing surfaces it when it would be useful. This is not a bookmarking tool. It transcribes what you saved and hands it back unprompted while you work.
demo-compressed.mp4 #
share sheet ─┐
├─► /ingest ─► queue ─► fetch ─► transcribe ─► frame gate ─► extract ─► vault/*.md + FTS5
data export ─┘ │
Claude Code skill · MCP · weekly digest ◄┘
cd stash
/opt/homebrew/bin/python3.12 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -e ".[mcp]"
cp .env.example .env
.venv/bin/python -m stash doctor
doctor
names anything missing and the exact command to fix it. Three things matter:
1. brew install ffmpeg yt-dlp
2. A Groq key. Get one at
console.groq.com/keys and put it in .env
.
Groq Whisper transcribes reel/video audio; qwen/qwen3.6-27b
reads static posts,
carousel slides, and selected reel frames, then returns the final JSON note.
No Claude call is made while processing. For transcription only, the offline
alternative remains .venv/bin/pip install -e ".[local-whisper]"
.
3. Instagram cookies — you probably don't need any. Both cookie settings ship blank on purpose. Public reels download fine anonymously; measured on real saved posts in August 2026, metadata and full video+audio both came back with no session at all.
Verify it yourself before trusting this:
yt-dlp --skip-download --print "%(id)s | %(up)s" "https://www.instagram.com/reel/XXXX/"
Setting a cookie source when you don't need one is actively worse than leaving it
blank — --cookies-from-browser chrome
triggers a keychain prompt, and an unanswered prompt fails the download that would otherwise have succeeded.
If you do hit login walls (private accounts, sustained rate limiting), add a session then, cheapest first:
— a cookies.txt scoped to instagram.com, exported with the "Get cookies.txt LOCALLY" extension,STASH_COOKIES_FILE
chmod 600
. yt-dlp gets your Instagram session and nothing else.— no keychain grant needed on macOS.STASH_COOKIES_FROM_BROWSER=firefox
— last resort. Chrome's cookies are AES-encrypted with a login keychain key that decrypts=chrome
everysite you are signed into, not just Instagram. Standing permission for an unattended worker to use that is a far wider blast radius than this task warrants.
A cookies file is your Instagram login in plain text. Keep it out of git; revoke it from Instagram → Settings → Security → where you're logged in.
Static posts use one vision image. Carousels preserve slide order and send every slide; Groq's per-request image limit is handled automatically in ordered batches. Mixed carousels also transcribe each video slide. Reels keep the existing Whisper plus selective-frame path.
.venv/bin/python -m stash add "https://www.instagram.com/reel/..." -n "why I saved it"
.venv/bin/python -m stash process
.venv/bin/python -m stash search "agent memory"
.venv/bin/python -m stash status
Notes land in vault/
as markdown with YAML frontmatter. That's the durable
artifact — the SQLite index is derived and stash reindex
rebuilds it from disk.
Three pieces: a Shortcut that posts to Cloudflare, a Worker that holds the queue, and a daemon on the Mac that drains it. Set up in that order.
This is what makes capture independent of your Mac — the phone talks to Cloudflare over HTTPS from anywhere: cellular, a café, lid shut.
cd worker && npm install
npx wrangler login # browser, free account, no card
npx wrangler d1 create stash # paste the id into wrangler.toml
npx wrangler d1 migrations apply stash --remote
npx wrangler secret put STASH_SECRET # any long random string
npx wrangler deploy
Put the deployed URL and the same secret into .env
as STASH_WORKER_URL
and
STASH_SECRET
. Everything downstream switches to the remote queue on its own.
Free tier throughout: Workers 100k req/day, D1 5 GB. No R2 and therefore no payment method — R2 is the one product here that asks for a card, and nothing currently running needs it, so it is left unconfigured.
sh shortcuts/build.sh
Renders shortcuts/Stash.cherri.template
with your Worker URL and secret,
compiles it with Cherri, and signs it. AirDrop the
resulting Stash.shortcut
to your phone, or open it on a Mac on the same Apple ID and it syncs.
Delete every older Stash shortcut. Several near-identical entries in the share sheet, some pointing at endpoints that no longer exist, is how this silently broke before.
The Shortcut says "Queued", not "saved" — deliberately. It only knows the request reached Cloudflare. Confirmation that a note actually exists comes separately, from step 4.
sh stash/launchd/install.sh # starts at login, restarts on crash
Or stash daemon
in a terminal to watch it work. Either way:
stash status # says ALIVE/DOWN, checking pid liveness AND heartbeat age
That check exists because a receiver process once died quietly and nothing said so. A hung-but-not-exited daemon is reported down too, not just a dead one.
stash notify # sends a test; --fail for the failure shape
Set STASH_NOTIFY
to ntfy
or imessage
in .env
first — see the comments
there. Both are free; ntfy
is verified working, imessage
needs no app install but does need a one-time Automation grant, so test it before trusting it.
Processing. A save is never lost — it sits in D1 — but the note appears when the Mac is next awake with the daemon running. Capture is the part that no longer depends on anything.
The old iCloud-file path (shortcuts/Stash-icloud.cherri
stash watch
) still works and needs no accounts at all, if you'd rather have zero infrastructure.
No API has ever exposed Instagram Saved collections. The data export is the only route, and Meta takes hours to days to produce it — request it now:
Accounts Center → Your information and permissions → Export your information →
JSON
.venv/bin/python scripts/import_export.py ~/Downloads/instagram-export --dry-run
.venv/bin/python scripts/import_export.py ~/Downloads/instagram-export
Then drain slowly. Pushing a few hundred permalinks through yt-dlp back-to-back is the fastest way to get rate-limited, which breaks live capture too:
while .venv/bin/python -m stash process --limit 1 | grep -q wrote; do sleep 45; done
This is the part that decides whether you still use it in a month.
MCP server — stash/mcp_server.py
, registered at user scope:
claude mcp add --scope user stash -- /path/to/stash/.venv/bin/python -m stash.mcp_server
User scope, not project scope — it's connected in every Claude Code session
regardless of which repo you're in, not only inside this one. Gives Claude
search_stash
, get_stash_note
, list_stash_topics
, recent_stash
,
mark_stash_used
. search_stash
returns compact hits (short id, title,
one-line summary, tools) to keep it cheap to call often; get_stash_note
pulls full detail — transcript, next step, permalink — for whichever hit turns out to matter.
Claude Code skill — ~/.claude/skills/stash-recall/
, also user scope and for the same reason: the material in the vault isn't specific to any one project, so the skill needs to fire wherever you happen to be working. It's written to trigger when you start technical work, not when you ask it to search, because you will never think to ask.
** mark_stash_used** looks optional and isn't.
used
vs unused
is the only
measure of whether this is a knowledge base or a graveyard. If nothing is ever
marked used after a month, change how recall works rather than filing more notes.Search is hybrid — FTS5 (exact tokens: a repo name, a product name) fused
with local vector search (meaning) via weighted Reciprocal Rank Fusion. Plain
keyword search alone missed things by paraphrase: "how do I make videos
automatically" ranked the two notes actually about generating video 6th and
8th, behind a WhatsApp chatbot, because BM25 has no notion that "automatically"
and "generation" are related ideas. Embeddings run locally via
fastembed + BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5
(no
API key, no network, no PyTorch) and RRF fusion runs through
sqlite-vec inside the same SQLite file
as everything else — no separate vector database. Degrades to keyword-only,
with a one-time warning, if either is unavailable; a capture can never fail
over search infrastructure. stash doctor
reports vector status and flags if stored vectors were embedded under a different model than the one currently configured.
Whisper is mandatory on Instagram — reels have auto-captions in the app but Instagram doesn't expose them to downs (yt-dlp#15874), so the subtitles-first shortcut other tools lead with never fires here.
Given a transcript, frames are pulled only where the audio stopped being self-sufficient — segments Whisper was unsure about, and phrases like "run this command" or "link in bio" that point at the screen. Idea borrowed from media-mcp. A talking head gets one frame; a screen recording gets frames at the moments that matter; a silent reel falls back to even sampling. Capped at 5 — frames dominate token cost.
Two vision limits worth knowing before you tune anything, both measured against the live API rather than assumed:
3 images per request is a hard API cap, not a choice. A 4th returns HTTP 400._describe_visuals
batches around it.512px is the optimum, and bigger is worse. Token cost is flat across resolution (Groq normalises images to a fixed budget), but on a dense screenshot 512px transcribed 1328 chars including "MIT license" while 1024px managed ~700 and garbled text the smaller version read correctly. Raising it looks free and isn't.
.venv/bin/python -m pytest tests/ -q
stash/
config.py env + paths
db.py capture queue + FTS5 note index
fetch.py CDN direct / yt-dlp / cobalt
transcribe.py groq or faster-whisper, with per-segment confidence
frames.py the confidence gate
extract.py groq vision + structured JSON
vault.py markdown + frontmatter
pipeline.py orchestration
remote.py Worker-backed queue client
daemon.py poll loop + heartbeat (the durable capture path)
notify.py iMessage / ntfy confirmation
local_receiver.py LAN receiver (superseded by the Worker)
watch.py iCloud-file watcher (zero-infrastructure fallback)
mcp_server.py recall tools
launchd/ run the daemon at login
worker/ Cloudflare Worker + D1 (no R2 — see above)
shortcuts/ Cherri source for the iOS Shortcut
scripts/ data-export backfill