youtube-research-automation

youtube-research-automation is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills. It costs 31 tokens per session (2,077 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to repeatable workflows for finding YouTube videos and channels, reading transcripts, and monitoring new uploads. A transcript is the written text of what was said in a video.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to retrieve transcripts, summarize or quote videos, search topics and channels, browse playlists, and watch channels for new uploads.
Why use it?
It helps agents research YouTube without manually copying captions or setting up Google API quotas and OAuth, which is Google's delegated login process.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Which agent this was written for is unclear — built for openclaw. Also seen: built for openclaw.

Good fit Use it to retrieve transcripts, summarize or quote videos, search topics and channels, browse playlists, and watch channels for new uploads.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills/youtube-research-automation
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills --skill youtube-research-automation
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for youtube-research-automation

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills/youtube-research-automation/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills/youtube-research-automation)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills/youtube-research-automation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills/youtube-research-automation/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for youtube-research-automation

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills/youtube-research-automation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills/youtube-research-automation.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 31 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,077 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 2 findings, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium MCP Rug Pull · line 95
    npx commands without a version suffix (e.g. @1.0.0) create a rug-pull risk if the upstream server is compromised and publishes a malicious update.
    Fix: Pin the version: npx @scope/[email protected]
  • medium Excessive Agency · line 168
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00031 $0.02077
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.01038
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00415
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00208

Measured 12d ago against content hash 868095974bc3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

youtube-research-automation scanned grade A with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

curl "https://transcriptapi.com/api/v2/youtube/transcript?video_url=VIDEO_ID&format=text" \
categories/automation/youtube-research-automation/SKILL.md · 205 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 205 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

YouTube Research Automation

Use this skill when an agent needs to read what was said in a video, find videos or channels on a topic, walk a channel or playlist, or watch a channel for new uploads, and you want that to run as a repeatable workflow rather than a manual copy and paste.

Recommended implementation:

  • youtube-skills for any runtime that supports the Agent Skills format. It ships twelve skills, and youtube-full covers transcripts, video and channel search, channel browsing, and playlist extraction in one install.
  • youtube-mcp when the runtime speaks MCP instead of skills. Same tools, remote endpoint, API key or OAuth.

Both call TranscriptAPI, an independent REST API for YouTube content. It is not affiliated with YouTube or Google, and it is not the official YouTube Data API. That is the point of using it here: no Google Cloud project, no OAuth consent screen, and no daily quota unit accounting.

When to Use

Use this skill when the user asks for:

  • The transcript, captions, or subtitles of a video, or a summary of one.
  • Quotes, claims, timestamps, or numbers taken from a talk, lecture, or review.
  • Videos or channels about a topic, without a browser in the loop.
  • Every video on a channel, or a channel's recent uploads.
  • Every video in a playlist, with titles and IDs.
  • A recurring job that checks a channel and reports what is new.
  • Research where video is fresher or more specific than written sources.

Do not use this skill for:

  • Downloading or re-hosting video or audio files. This is a text and metadata workflow, and republishing someone's content is a licensing question, not a technical one.
  • Uploading, commenting, account management, or anything that writes to YouTube.
  • Videos with no captions. There is no transcript to fetch, so plan a fallback.
  • Private or unlisted content the user does not own.

Read the full file on GitHub · 205 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 205 lines · 31 tokens per session scan A 868095974bc3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

youtube-research-automation is a skill published in the GitHub repository cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills (471 stars, last pushed 17d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 31 tokens to every session and 2,077 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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