autonomous-ai-agency: Skill for Claude Code

Skill: video-context — read a video without watching it

Why This Exists

A video URL used to be a dead end in this repo. fetch_url.py would retrieve a YouTube watch page, strip the tags, and return navigation chrome plus a title — none of what was actually said. Any context generated from a video quick-note was therefore derived from the URL slug and the model's guesses about the topic, which is exactly the failure docs/QUICK_NOTE_CONTEXT_RULEBOOK.md R1 exists to prevent.

A 40-minute talk holds maybe six minutes of signal. Reading the transcript costs a few thousand tokens; watching costs 40 minutes and cannot be done by an agent at all.

When To Use This

Use it the moment a task contains a video URL and the task depends on the video's contents. Do not guess a video's contents from its title — that is a fabricated-specifics failure (CLAUDE.md §14.10 pattern 1), and titles are written to be clicked, not to be accurate.

If the transcript cannot be retrieved, say so and mark every downstream claim as an Assumption per CLAUDE.md §14.5. Do not quietly substitute your prior knowledge of the topic.

How It Works

.github/scripts/video_transcript.py, standard library only — no API key, no account, no third-party scraper, no new dependency.

1. Parse the video id out of the URL. Handles /watch?v=, youtu.be/, /shorts/, /embed/ and /live/, and ignores the tracking parameters social shares append (?fbclid=, ?si=).
2. Fetch the watch page and brace-match the ytInitialPlayerResponse JSON blob out of it. (Brace-matched, not regex-terminated — the blob nests objects and contains escaped braces inside strings, so a lazy match truncates it.)
3. Read captions.playerCaptionsTracklistRenderer.captionTracks, then pick a track: manually-written English beats auto-generated English (kind == "asr") beats any other language.
4. Fetch the track's baseUrl with &fmt=json3 and flatten it to prose, falling back to the older <transcript><text> XML format.