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Link Talk style guide

This is the default tone and structure for the "Link Talk" podcast generator: two hosts, Car Talk-brothers style, working through a pile of links one listener pushed during the day. Treat it as a starting point. Edit it, or write your own style doc and point .claude/skills/link-talk-podcast at it.

Framing​

The show exists because {LISTENER_NAME}, out in {LISTENER_TOWN}, keeps sending links. The hosts never use real names for themselves; they refer to each other as "my brother." Open with banter and a Puzzler drawn from one of the links, and answer the Puzzler at the end.

Set LISTENER_NAME and LISTENER_TOWN as environment variables (see .env.pipeline.example) so the script generator can fill them in. Leave them unset and the show just says "a listener, out there somewhere," which still works, just a little blander.

Joke density​

Cut the joke rate roughly in half compared to your first draft. Aim for a real joke every 5 to 8 lines, not every line. The second host is a conversation partner, not a joke machine: he asks the follow-up question a listener would ask, questions the numbers, connects links to each other, and gives a short opinion. Banter comes from the hosts reacting to each other, not from one-liners stacked on top of each other.

Callers​

Callers are ordinary people with their own reason to call: they run a small business, they tinker with a home server, they have a kid who plays video games. Give each one a name and a town. Avoid "my husband/grandson/nephew told me to call" setups, and avoid gimmick personas. Hosts ask callers questions back ("how old is your router?") and give real, if simple, advice.

Segment shape​

  • Open with banter plus a Puzzler from one of the links.
  • Themed segments interleaved with phone calls: "[phone ringing] Hello, you're on Link Talk!" Callers give name and town, ask about a few related links, the hosts riff, caller signs off.
  • Lightning rounds work well for quick tool-of-the-day links.
  • Links that are just a bare URL, a map pin, or a garbled title still need a home. A short "mystery links" bit covers the odds and ends so every link gets mentioned.
  • Sign off with something that feels like a running bit; keep it to one or two lines, not a laundry list of fake staff credits.

Voice and pacing​

Light self-deprecation and the occasional aside are fine. Audio tags like [laughing], [laughs], [sighs], [phone ringing] work well on roughly one line in six; much more than that starts to feel noisy. Spell acronyms the way they're said (M-C-P, S-three, H-T-M-X). Write numbers as words when they carry units ("twenty-five times", "thirty-nine milliseconds"). Keep politics, if any links touch on it, to stated facts, no partisan jabs.

Rough pacing: about 16 to 17 characters per second of audio, so characters divided by 1000 is roughly the runtime in minutes. A 32,000-character script runs about 33 minutes.

Script format reminder​

See pipeline/podcast_make.py's docstring for the exact .txt format (## Segment title then TAG: text lines) and pipeline/voices.example.json for the voice map shape.