Laterlist • Preview 2026
A web app that sorts your YouTube Watch Later
- Role
- Product Design, Brand Identity, Product Direction
- Timeline
- July 2026 to October 2026 (first version in four days)
- Team
- Solo
- Tools
- React, Chrome Extension APIs, Supabase, Vercel, Jev (TypeSafe) via OpenRouter, Claude API, AI-assisted development
- Client
- Personal product, not public yetVisit project ↗
- Videos in my own Watch Later, untouched for months
- 2,903
- To sort all 3,334 of my videos, with the tab closed
- 33.6s
- Automated tests passing at the last release
- 306
Laterlist reads your Watch Later and puts every video on one of five shelves. It is not public yet. I designed it, made every product call, and picked which AI to trust.
Problem
Every video looks the same. You can't search or sort.
A three minute music video and a forty minute lecture look the same: a thumbnail, a title, a channel. You pick one from hundreds with almost nothing to go on.
So the list isn't too long. It's impossible to choose from. Closing the tab makes sense.
Process
On July 12, YouTube shut down server access. I rebuilt as an extension in a day.
The first version read Watch Later from a server. On July 12, that stopped working. Only code inside your own signed-in browser could still read the list.
So I rebuilt it as a Chrome extension in a day. YouTube's official tools never offered Watch Later anyway. The browser was the honest path all along.
Process
I tested two AI sorters on my real videos and kept the one that matched me.
The sorting ran on Claude Haiku. Then I found Jev, a model built just for picking labels.
I judged 35 videos where they disagreed. After three rounds of rules, Jev got 25 right and Haiku stayed at 18. On my live list, Jev matched me on 21 of 30 videos.
Final Design
Five shelves, sorted in 34 seconds, and one daily user so far: me.
Sync once, and every video lands on one of five shelves. You can filter by length and topic. A summary from the captions tells you if a fifty minute video is worth it.
The sort keeps going with the tab closed. All 3,334 of my videos took 33.6 seconds.
Reflection
I refused to delete anything from your real YouTube list.
Everyone asks for a delete button, and I built one. Then I blocked it. YouTube doesn't support it, so one mistake could erase saved videos with no undo.
I also renamed "dismiss" to "not interested," because a label should say what the person meant. It isn't public yet. Next is a test with ten strangers.
