Short

Make a vertical lesson video from a topic and optional notes. It is not a trimmed YouTube lesson: the script, the pacing and the picture are built for a phone held upright with the sound possibly off.

The recorder, the voice and the mix are the lesson skill's (../lesson/scripts). Everything that skill's SKILL.md says about driving the app still holds and is not repeated here: the pristine ~/.lpm-lessons data dir, /Users/Shared/lpm-lessons workspace, the lesson control socket, real pointer and keys (s.keys("return"), never cliclick kp:), agent trust, waitFor/click/type selectors, foreground takes, the OpenAI key in the Keychain, the preflight and lint that check the Mac and the script before every take, the take folders (_takes/), the guarded agent settings and the checks after the mux (qa/report.json; the screen is read on the take's clock). The beat API is in lesson/reference/beats-api.md.

What makes it TikTok-native

• Vertical 1080x1920, 20–45 s. The app runs in a portrait window (820x1040 pt by default; "window" in lesson.json). The window floats on a dark canvas with cyan, pink and violet glows. A virtual camera cuts a 9:16 crop from it that eases between a wide shot (the whole window width) and push-ins that follow the action.
• Payoff first, and held. The video opens cold on the finished result (a later moment of the take) under the hook line and a big headline sticker. The steps come after. Frame 0 is already the payoff with text on it, so it is also the cover. The opening lines' beats are never seen, so the last of them does the setup (pick the project, start an agent).
• Don't cut away at 2 s. TikTok's retention graph for the best video so far (1.9K views) showed most viewers leaving at 0:02, the moment a one-line opening cut from the result to the app's setup. Its likes peaked at 0:01, on the result. Open on two lines over the payoff ("open": 2, about 4–5 s): the hook, then a line that gives a reason to keep watching.
• Hook in under 2.5 s. One short sentence: a problem ("Stop guessing your Claude Code limits."), a surprising fact, or a result. Never "In this video", never "Here's how to set it up in lpm". The headline sticker says what the video delivers ("Claude Code limits, right under your prompt 👀").
• Burned-in word-by-word captions. Most people watch muted. Pages of up to 3 words sit in the lower middle, heavy white with a black stroke, the spoken word in yellow, *word* in cyan. They are timed from the voice clip's own transcript.
• Numbered step stickers. A line's "label" puts "① Open Settings" at the top of the frame until the next one.
• No dead air. Lines follow each other with 140 ms gaps. Typing and agent thinking are jump-cut with s.skip(). The voice is quick and upbeat (DEFAULT_STYLE in scripts/make.js, sped up 1.08x with pitch kept; "tempo" in lesson.json).
• Ends on the result. The last line plays over the payoff shot the video opened on (it loops cleanly), with an lpm.cx end sticker. No outro card, no "follow for part 2", no next-lesson teaser (user rule: every video stands alone).
• Safe zones. Stickers, captions and push-in targets keep clear of TikTok's own UI: the top tabs, the right-hand button column, and the caption and sound area at the bottom. The review sheet draws those zones in.

Writing the lesson

~/Movies/lpm-lessons/tiktok/<slug>/lesson.json (LPM_TIKTOK_DIR for another root):

{
  "title": "Claude Code statusline: see your usage limits live",
  "window": { "w": 860, "h": 1040 },
  "narration": [
    { "id": "hook", "text": "Stop guessing your Claude Code limits.", "headline": "Claude Code limits, right under your prompt 👀" },
    { "id": "settings", "text": "In lpm, open More and pick Settings.", "label": "Open Settings" },
    { "id": "pick", "text": "Pick *Clean*. Context left, plus your *5-hour* and *weekly* limits.", "label": "Pick Clean" },
    { "id": "wrap", "text": "Now you'll see a limit coming before you hit it." }
  ],
  "post": { "caption": "…", "hashtags": ["claudecode", "aicoding", "devtools", "lpm"] }
}

• 6–9 lines, 60–110 words in total. One action per line, 3–9 words, spoken in the second person, the way someone talks to a friend.
• Commas become audible pauses (a one-comma line lost 0.9 s). Prefer two short sentences to one long one.
• Mark 1–3 key words per line with *…*; the asterisks are never read aloud. Digits read well ("5-hour") and show as digits in the captions.
• open is how many lines play over the payoff (default 1). With 2 or more, only the last opening line may do slow setup in its beat; a wait in an earlier one plays as silence over the payoff (the cut logs it). The payoff shot must last as long as the opening (the opening on the payoff log line), so mark it early enough in the last lines.
• headline (on the first line, or top-level) is the cover text: 4–8 words, with at most one emoji. Lead with the words people search for (below). cta changes the end sticker (default lpm.cx; false for none).
• slam ({ "a": "Fable 5.1", "b": "Opus 5.5" }, optional "colors") opens on two names slammed in big over the dimmed payoff: a in cyan from the left, a VS, b in pink from the right. After 1.5 s the stack shrinks away and the headline pops in at 1.65 s (left out when the opening has under 0.6 s left). The cover is then the frame at 1.2 s, with all three lines on screen and no headline. Names are sized to fit 820 px, so long ones shrink.
• post.caption goes into post.txt for TikTok: one or two search-friendly sentences (people search TikTok like Google), then at most 5 hashtags (TikTok's cap: a 6th loses its #), lpm among them. Keep the brand lowercase lpm.
• Use searched words. Search sent 0% of the views so far, and For You shows a new account's posts mostly to people near the phone that posts them, so search is the way to reach coding viewers elsewhere. TikTok's Creator Search Insights (global, 2026-09-27): "claude tips" 224K and rising fast, "claude vs gemini" 194K, "claude ai vs chatgpt" 138K, "claude vs gemini vs gpt" 127K, "ai agents for beginners" 116K, "vibe coding apps" 96K, "how to vibe code with claude code" 85K; "claude code tips" only 1.9K, and nobody searches for "claude limit". Say "Claude" and "ChatGPT" rather than "Claude Code" and "Codex" in headlines and captions, and frame a feature as a "Claude tip" rather than by its lpm name.
• settings in lesson.json seeds the app's settings.json (for example terminalFontSize); "limits": false leaves the sidebar meters out.