youtube

youtube is a skill for Claude Code from tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent. It costs 80 tokens per session (1,618 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A note-taking workflow for YouTube videos, an online video platform, that uses a video's transcript or captions to create a vault note.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when you share a YouTube link or ask for notes or a summary, provided the video has captions or a transcript.
Why use it?
It turns a video into searchable written notes and checks whether notes for the same video already exist.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: names the TodoWrite tool.

Part of the obsidian-vault-agent plugin — 13 skills, 16 agents, 3 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it when you share a YouTube link or ask for notes or a summary, provided the video has captions or a transcript.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent/youtube
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 tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent --skill youtube
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install obsidian-vault-agent, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 13 skills, 16 agents, 3 hooks.

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

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent/youtube/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent/youtube)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent/youtube"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent/youtube/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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent/youtube"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent/youtube.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 80 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,618 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 $0.00080 $0.01618
Opus 5 $0.00040 $0.00809
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00324
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00162

Measured 11d ago against content hash 36fd74ef0c13, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

youtube 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 11d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/fetch_youtube.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/youtube/SKILL.md · 198 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 198 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

<Use_When>

  • User shares a YouTube URL and wants notes taken
  • User says "take notes from this video"
  • User pastes a YouTube link with /youtube
  • User wants to add a video's insights to the vault </Use_When>

<Do_Not_Use_When>

  • User wants to watch or download the video itself
  • User has a local video file (not YouTube)
  • Video has no transcript/captions at all
  • User wants to process an existing vault note (use /process) </Do_Not_Use_When>

<Execution_Policy>

  • Extract first, synthesize second, integrate third
  • Always check vault for existing notes on the same video before creating
  • Create note as type: post with processing_status: inbox
  • The note is a starting point — user can /process it later for deeper engagement </Execution_Policy>

Stage 1: EXTRACT

Parse the YouTube URL/ID from $ARGUMENTS. If no URL provided, ask the user.

Run the extraction script. Redirect stdout to a temp file (stderr has progress messages that break piping):

SKILL_DIR="${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}"
YT_OUTPUT="$SKILL_DIR/_output.json"
uv run "$SKILL_DIR/scripts/fetch_youtube.py" "VIDEO_URL" --lang en > "$YT_OUTPUT"

Then read $YT_OUTPUT with the Read tool to get the JSON. Clean up the file after use.

The JSON contains:

  • title, channel, duration, upload_date, description, chapters
  • transcript.full_text, transcript.segments, transcript.language
  • transcript.error (null if success)

If transcript.error is not null: inform the user and stop. No note without content.

If transcript is very long (>50,000 chars): warn the user this is a long video. Chunk the transcript for the agent if needed — send first 40,000 chars with a note about total length. For very long videos (>2hrs), consider suggesting the user watch key sections instead.

Read the full file on GitHub · 198 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. 11d ago First seen · 198 lines · 80 tokens per session scan A 36fd74ef0c13

Subscribe to this mod's changes

youtube is a skill published in the GitHub repository tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent (39 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 80 tokens to every session and 1,618 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 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.

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