I’ve always felt that reputation management tools have a major blind spot: they are great at tracking web and social media text, but they completely overlook what’s being actually spoken inside YouTube videos.

To solve this for myself at my previous job, I built a hacky Excel VBA script. It got the job done, but it was clunky, tied to Excel, and I kept forgetting to run it. I really wanted to build a proper, lightweight standalone version.

There was just one problem: I wanted to build it in Go, and my Go experience was exactly zero.

The AI Advantage: Architecting vs. Typing

Instead of spending weeks learning syntax, I tried a different approach. I brought the logic, system design, and architecture from my VBA days, but I essentially used AI as my hands to write the actual Go code. I designed the core logic, and directed the AI to handle the syntax and implementation.

The result is SentryScript, a portable Windows app that monitors specific YouTube channels for your keywords.…