[JacobStephens2]

Summary

Research that shaped a set of thirdshift explainer videos (an executive cut, engineering cuts, a getting-started tutorial and a sound-off marketing cut). Docs only.

 docs/research/
+├── explainer-video-clarity.md      # Mayer's principles, pace, captions vs. narration, diagram rules, WCAG
+├── explainer-video-music.md        # music under narration, loudness targets, ElevenLabs music terms
+├── explainer-newcomer-concepts.md  # 8 terms to pre-teach, misconceptions to correct, with repo evidence
+├── explainer-video-audiences.md    # engineers vs. technical executives; honest value claims (FTC)
+├── explainer-video-marketing.md    # sound-off social/hero cut: formats, hook, what developers trust
+└── explainer-video-tutorial.md     # tutorial practice + exact commands and real output per step

Each follows the folder's convention (research date, Question, Method, Out of scope, TL;DR, cited sections) and ends with checkable rules.

Evidence

• Claims checked against the repo, one correction made: the newcomer note first repeated the architecture prototype's line "the agent never marks its own work ready". prompts/fresh.md:12 tells the opening session to open the pull request "marked ready for review", so the note now says the agent never decides whether the pull request stays ready, or merges (ADR 0004).
• Proof point verified on GitHub: issue update https://thirdshift.app/ based on the latest which is part of thirdshift #663 was labelled in-progress at 04:21Z (00:21 −0400) and PR Refresh homepage for current factory workflows #665 merged at 05:22Z, matching site/index.html. That Run used codex, which the notes record so videos don't caption it as Claude Code.
• Flagged, not papered over: vendor-only data (Wistia, Vidyard), X pages unreadable to non-browser clients, paywalled sources, and the superseded METR slowdown result are each marked in the notes.
• No private paths, keys or addresses: rg for scratch paths, API key names and email addresses in the six files finds nothing.

Merge Danger

Door: two-way

Blast Radius: none

Markdown under docs/research/ only; nothing generated, built or shipped reads it.