youtube-to-atoms

youtube-to-atoms is a skill for Claude Code from fredoliveira/agents. It costs 50 tokens per session (1,038 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A YouTube-to-notes tool for Obsidian, a note-taking application. It fetches a video's transcript and turns its ideas into a source note and separate atomic notes, each focused on one reusable idea.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when you have a YouTube URL and want to extract ideas or create atomic notes from the video.
Why use it?
It saves you from watching, transcribing, and manually breaking a video into linked notes.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Good fit Use it when you have a YouTube URL and want to extract ideas or create atomic notes from the video.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/fredoliveira/agents/youtube-to-atoms
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 fredoliveira/agents --skill youtube-to-atoms
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/fredoliveira/agents

Made for: Claude Code.

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-to-atoms

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fredoliveira/agents/youtube-to-atoms/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/fredoliveira/agents/youtube-to-atoms)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/fredoliveira/agents/youtube-to-atoms"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fredoliveira/agents/youtube-to-atoms/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-to-atoms

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/fredoliveira/agents/youtube-to-atoms"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fredoliveira/agents/youtube-to-atoms.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 50 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,038 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 $0.00050 $0.01038
Opus 5.5 $0.00020 $0.00415
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00010 $0.00208
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00104

Measured 1mo ago against content hash 824cbc459cd5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

youtube-to-atoms scanned grade A with 0 findings 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 1mo ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (fetch_transcript.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills-experimental/youtube-to-atoms/SKILL.md · 104 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 104 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

YouTube → atomic notes

Purpose

Turn one YouTube video into a source note plus a set of atomic notes in an Obsidian vault. The unit of extraction is a solid, transferable idea or concept — not a summary.

The note style (what an atomic note is, frontmatter, linking, a worked example) is fully codified in the bundled reference.md — this skill is self-contained and does not depend on any particular vault existing beforehand.

Configuration

The vault root is the YT_VAULT environment variable, defaulting to ~/Documents/obsidian/yt. The skill reads/writes three subfolders (created automatically):

  • $YT_VAULT/Transcripts/ — fetched transcript (provenance)
  • $YT_VAULT/Sources/ — one source note per video
  • $YT_VAULT/Atoms/ — the atomic notes

To target a different vault, set YT_VAULT before invoking (e.g. export YT_VAULT=~/notes/myvault).

Instructions

1. Fetch the transcript

Run the bundled script with the URL the user gave you:

python3 "${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/fetch_transcript.py" "<youtube url>"

It prints the absolute path of the transcript markdown file (or an ERROR: line if the video has no English captions, or if YouTube throttled the request — relay that to the user and stop). If a transcript for that video already exists, it prints the existing path.

Requires yt-dlp (python3 -m pip install yt-dlp). Auto-generated captions are used when no human captions exist — they extract fine.

2. Read the transcript IN FULL

Read the printed file completely (page through with offset/limit if it's long — many videos run for hours). Do not extract from a partial read. The frontmatter holds url, channel, duration; body paragraphs are prefixed with **[MM:SS]** timestamps.

3. Learn the style, then extract

Read reference.md (in this skill's directory) — it is the authoritative guide for note shape, linking, and the worked example. Then extract atomic notes from the transcript following it. The essentials:

Read the full file on GitHub · 104 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 1mo ago First seen · 104 lines · 50 tokens per session scan A 824cbc459cd5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

youtube-to-atoms is a skill published in the GitHub repository fredoliveira/agents (25 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 50 tokens to every session and 1,038 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.