A few weeks back I wrote about the lessons I learned building 120+ free tools solo. A few people asked which tool was the hardest to actually keep working hands down, it's the video downloader. Not because the initial version was hard to build. Because YouTube (and every other platform) actively fights you, and the "happy path" breaks constantly in production.
Here's what building and maintaining it actually looked like.
The naive version (day 1)
Like everyone, I started with yt-dlp. It's genuinely excellent handles 1000+ sites out of the box, actively maintained, and for the first few weeks it just worked.
python:
