youtube-notes

youtube-notes is a skill for Claude Code from nicknisi/claude-plugins. It costs 160 tokens per session (2,621 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A tool for getting captions from a YouTube video and turning them into notes organized by the video's chapters. YouTube is a video-sharing website, and captions are the written version of spoken content.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to fetch video captions, organize them by chapter, and create notes with clickable timestamps.
Why use it?
It turns a long video transcript into readable sections and attaches a timestamp to each claim, making information easier to check and revisit.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT} variable.

Runs only inside its plugin — its command needs a path that Claude Code sets for a plugin’s own hooks and for nothing else. Install the plugin, not this.

Part of the sources plugin — 2 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to fetch video captions, organize them by chapter, and create notes with clickable timestamps.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

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.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add nicknisi/claude-plugins
Claude Code
/plugin install sources

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install sources, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 2 skills.

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-notes

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nicknisi/claude-plugins/youtube-notes.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nicknisi/claude-plugins/youtube-notes)
Your own site
<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="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 160 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,621 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.
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 $0.00160 $0.02621
Opus 5 $0.00080 $0.01311
Sonnet 5 $0.00032 $0.00524
Haiku 4.5 $0.00016 $0.00262

Measured 7d ago against content hash 400c5d01a5ba, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

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 7d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (scripts/fetch_video.ts, test/run.sh), 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.

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
plugins/sources/skills/youtube-notes/SKILL.md · 291 lines

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:

  1. Pull --mode triage to see the chapter map and size.
  2. For a short or medium video, pull --mode full and keep it in context. Every follow-up is then answered without another call.
  3. For something multi-hour, pull the chapters that bear on the question with --chapters, and pull more as the conversation moves. Cached, so cheap.

Read the full file on GitHub · 291 lines

Files

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.

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. 7d ago First seen · 291 lines · 160 tokens per session scan A 400c5d01a5ba

Subscribe to this mod's changes

youtube-notes is a skill published in the GitHub repository nicknisi/claude-plugins (114 stars, last pushed 27d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 160 tokens to every session and 2,621 once invoked, about $0.0008 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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