YouTube killed my comment alerts — I vibe-coded a one-hour fix

Comments are the lifeblood of YouTube engagement, and I used to rely on email alerts to respond quickly. Until the middle of last year YouTube sent an email whenever a viewer commented, but at the end of June it quietly turned that feature off. Social network managers can surface YouTube comments, but logging into a dashboard didn't prompt me to act; I live in email, so I needed messages landing in folders I check every day.

Rather than signing up for a third‑party tool, I used Gemini to write a small Python script that polls the YouTube Data API v3 every hour and emails links to new comments. Gemini generated the script and walked me through filling in YOUTUBE_API_KEY, CHANNEL_ID and an EMAIL_PASSWORD (a Gmail app password), and it guided me through enabling the YouTube Data API v3 in the Google Cloud Console and copying the channel ID from Advanced Settings.

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