Hook mining

Most AI hook writing is slop for one of two reasons: it copy-pastes a hook that worked for someone else, or it "rewrites" it until the English is flat and the psychology is gone.

This does neither. It keeps the data for what worked — the structure, the psychological mechanism, the rhythm — and swaps only the power words. Proven skeleton stays, skin changes.

1. Get real hooks in

You cannot mine what you do not have. The input is a CSV of hooks that actually performed:

• a Sandcastles (sandcastles.ai) export — it analyses the top videos in your niche and ranks the best hooks; export that tab to CSV
• any social-analytics export with a hook/title/caption column and a views/likes/score column
• competitor hooks pulled with the agent-reach skill, or breakdowns from reel-analyzer

Column names are never predictable, so don't hand-parse.

2. Mine it

python skills/hook-mining/mine_hooks.py hooks.csv [--top 40]

Auto-detects the hook column and the performance column, ranks, buckets by pattern, and flags the power words already present. Writes hooks.mined.json. Run --selftest to verify the parsing.

Patterns it sorts into: result-proof · time-bound · contrarian · secret-gap · listicle · how-to · warning-fear · newsjack · comparison · question · curiosity-tease · plain-statement.

3. Remix — the part that matters

For each hook worth reusing, produce 3–5 alternatives under one rule:

Keep the psychology. Swap the power words.

Hold fixed: the pattern, the clause order, the specificity (a number stays a number), the rhythm and syllable shape, the tension and where it resolves, the point of view.

Swap only: the charged words — the verb, the intensifier, the noun carrying the emotion. power_word_frequency in the mined JSON tells you which ones are earning their keep in your niche. Pull replacements from there, not from a thesaurus.

proven:   "You're using Claude wrong"                 [contrarian · you're + wrong]
  ✅      "You're prompting Claude backwards"          swapped the verb + the charge word
  ✅      "You're building agents the slow way"        same skeleton, same tension
  ❌      "Many people use Claude incorrectly"         psychology gone, flat English → slop
  ❌      "You're using Claude wrong"                  verbatim copy → plagiarism, the platform buries it

Then hand the winners to viral-hook-writer to rank, or straight into reel-scripter.

Hard rules

• Never ship a mined hook verbatim. It is someone else's line. Instagram's originality systems bury copies, and it's plagiarism. Model the technique, write your own words.
• Never remix the structure. Change the clause order or drop the number and you have thrown away the only thing the data proved.
• A number in the source stays a number in the remix — and it must be YOURS and real. Swapping in a stat you cannot defend is the fastest way to lose an audience.
• Rank before you mine. Remixing a hook that did not perform just launders a bad idea.
• Small buckets are signal. A pattern with two entries that both went viral beats one with forty mediocre ones. Weight by performance, not by count.

Failure modes

Symptom	Cause	Fix
Variants read flat / corporate	rewrote the sentence instead of swapping words	restore the original skeleton, change only the charged words
All variants sound identical	swapped one word in one slot	vary the slot — verb, intensifier, or emotional noun
Variants lost the tension	resolved the curiosity gap inside the hook	the gap stays open; the payoff belongs after the hook
Nothing outperforms	mining unranked or off-niche data	re-export ranked, filter to the actual niche

Where it sits

agent-reach / reel-analyzer find what's working → hook-mining turns that data into your own hooks → viral-hook-writer ranks → reel-scripter writes the script → reel-builder builds it.