Palimpsest: I Built a C++ Tool That Extracts Text From Scrolling Screen Recordings (94% Accuracy, 323 FPS on a Laptop)
Most of the code was AI-generated from a detailed architecture prompt. I designed the pipeline, the AI wrote the C++. Here's what we built.
I had a problem. My dad takes 1.5 hour long banking regulation classes recorded as screen recordings of someone scrolling through RBI circulars and banking law documents. No download link. No PDF. Just a video of text scrolling past.
I didn't want to type it all out manually.
So instead of spending 3 hours typing, I spent an afternoon designing a solution and prompting an AI to write the C++. The result is Palimpsest — a high-performance CLI tool that extracts text from screen recordings of scrolling documents, deduplicates overlapping frames, and outputs a clean .txt or .docx file.
