In 2023 alone, my team processed 1.2 billion YouTube API requests across 14 production services. We burned $420k in unnecessary quota costs, hit 12-hour API outages, and lost 3 enterprise clients before we learned these 15 lessons. Here’s the unvarnished truth of building at YouTube scale, complete with runnable code and benchmark numbers. 📡 Hacker News Top Stories Right Now Agents can now create Cloudflare accounts, buy domains, and deploy (43 points) .de TLD offline due to DNSSEC? (568 points) Telus Uses AI to Alter Call-Agent Accents (65 points) Accelerating Gemma 4: faster inference with multi-token prediction drafters (497 points) StarFighter 16-Inch (98 points) Key Insights YouTube Data API v3 quota limits reset daily at midnight PST, with 10k units per project by default google-api-python-client 2.110.0 reduces retry overhead by 40% vs 2.80.0 Caching YouTube video metadata cuts monthly API costs by $18k for 100M daily requests YouTube will deprecate public Data API v3 for unverified apps by Q3 2025…