Getting it into your agent
This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.
/plugin marketplace add nicknisi/claude-plugins/plugin install sourcesWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nicknisi/claude-plugins/youtube-notes)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nicknisi/claude-plugins/youtube-notes"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nicknisi/claude-plugins/youtube-notes/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nicknisi/claude-plugins/youtube-notes"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nicknisi/claude-plugins/youtube-notes.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00160 | $0.02621 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00064 | $0.01048 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00032 | $0.00524 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00016 | $0.00262 |
Grade A, and why
youtube-notes 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 2mo 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.
subtitles, and `curl` with a real browser User-Agent all get 429 on the caption How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 291 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
YouTube Notes
Turn a video into something citable. The bundled script does the mechanical work — fetching captions, aligning them to the uploader's chapters, merging caption slivers into readable blocks — so your job is synthesis and judgment.
Fetch
One TypeScript file, run directly by Node with no build step. The --help
output is the authoritative flag reference:
node ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/youtube-notes/scripts/fetch_video.ts --help
It shells out to uvx for youtube-transcript-api (captions) and yt-dlp
(metadata, chapters). Both run on demand; nothing is installed globally. If
uvx is missing the script exits 2 and tells the user to brew install uv.
The transcript is cached, so re-running is free
The first fetch for a video is cached by id. Every later call for that video reads from disk and touches no network: 35s becomes 0.06s, and switching modes or pulling different chapters costs nothing.
This shapes how to work. Do not ration calls to avoid refetching, because after
the first one there is no refetch. Pull triage to see the shape, then pull the
chapters you actually need, then pull different ones when the next question
lands. The only real budget is context, not network.
It is also the main defense against rate limiting, which is the failure mode this skill hits most. A request you never make cannot be throttled.
--refresh forces a refetch, which you need only if a video's captions were
genuinely republished. --no-cache skips it entirely.
The main use: answering questions about a video
Most requests here are conversational. Someone wants to interrogate a video, not receive a document. Expect several questions across a conversation about one video.
Load once, properly, then answer from what you have:
- Pull
--mode triageto see the chapter map and size. - For a short or medium video, pull
--mode fulland keep it in context. Every follow-up is then answered without another call. - For something multi-hour, pull the chapters that bear on the question with
--chapters, and pull more as the conversation moves. Cached, so cheap.
What ships with it
5 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.
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.
- 2mo ago First seen · 291 lines · 160 tokens per session scan A 400c5d01a5ba
youtube-notes is a skill published in the GitHub repository nicknisi/claude-plugins (114 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 160 tokens to every session and 2,621 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.
youtube-notes compared with skills from other repositories
| Mod | Type | Stars | Last push | Licence | Scan | Tokens | Works with |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| youtube-notesnicknisi/claude-plugins | Skill | 114 | 2mo ago | MIT | A | 160 | Claude Code |
| imagegenopenai/codex | Skill | 134k | today | Apache-2.0 | A | 113 | Codex |
| playwright-climicrosoft/playwright | Skill | 99k | today | Apache-2.0 | A | 19 | Claude Code |
| local-ai-agentsmicrosoft/ai-agents-for-beginners | Skill | 79k | today | MIT | A | 200 | Claude Code, Codex |
| systematic-debuggingobra/superpowers | Skill | 314k | 3d ago | MIT | A | 21 | Claude Code |
| next-cache-components-adoptionvercel/next.js | Skill | 143k | today | MIT | A | 95 | Claude Code |
| next-partial-prefetching-adoptionvercel/next.js | Skill | 143k | today | MIT | A | 103 | Claude Code |