What is youtube-search?

A search tool for finding YouTube videos through the YouTube Data API. YouTube is a video-hosting service, and the API is a programmatic way to search its content.

Use it to find videos by topic or channel, limit the number of results, filter by publication date or length, and retrieve structured video details.

It avoids manually browsing search results and can narrow results by channel, date, order, and duration, including excluding Shorts.

youtube-search — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by valtterimelkko

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 valtterimelkko/agent-workflow-skills --skill youtube-search

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/valtterimelkko/agent-workflow-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/valtterimelkko/agent-workflow-skills/youtube-search/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/valtterimelkko/agent-workflow-skills/youtube-search)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/valtterimelkko/agent-workflow-skills/youtube-search"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/valtterimelkko/agent-workflow-skills/youtube-search/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/valtterimelkko/agent-workflow-skills/youtube-search"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/valtterimelkko/agent-workflow-skills/youtube-search.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 40 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,439 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00040	$0.01439
Opus 5.5	$0.00016	$0.00576
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00008	$0.00288
Haiku 4.5	$0.00004	$0.00144

Measured 2mo ago against content hash 5c4fc127f784, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

youtube-search 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 2mo ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 4 executable files (scripts/youtube_channel_id.py, scripts/youtube_channel_search.py, scripts/youtube_channel_videos.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-search/SKILL.md · 153 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 153 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Search YouTube Videos

Search for YouTube videos using the YouTube Data API v3. Find videos by query across all of YouTube or within specific channels.

Prerequisites

YouTube API Key available in the environment or a shell startup file such as ~/.bashrc:

export YOUTUBE_API_KEY="your-api-key-here"

Get one from Google Cloud Console: Create project → Enable YouTube Data API v3 → Create API Key.

Daily quota: 10,000 units (each search ≈ 100 units, channel resolution ≈ 1 unit, playlist fetch ≈ 1 unit).

When to Use

Search videos by topic or channel
Filter by date, duration, sort order
Get up to 50 results per query

Quick Start

Basic search:

python3 ./scripts/youtube_search.py --query "AI tutorials" --max-results 10

Channel-specific (if you already have the channel ID):

python3 ./scripts/youtube_search.py --query "Python" --channel-id "UC123..." --max-results 20

Parameters

Parameter	Required	Default	Notes
`--query` or `-q`	Yes	-	Search term
`--channel-id` or `-c`	No	-	If provided, search only in this channel
`--max-results` or `-m`	No	10	Max 50 (preserves quota and LLM context)
`--order` or `-o`	No	relevance	date, rating, relevance, viewCount
`--published-after`	No	-	ISO 8601 format (e.g., "2025-01-01T00:00:00Z")
`--published-before`	No	-	ISO 8601 format
`--video-duration` or `-d`	No	any	any, short (<4min), medium (4-20min), long (>20min)

Helper Scripts (API Quota Warning)

⚠️ Each helper script uses API quota. Plan carefully before running multiple times.

1. youtube_channel_id.py - Resolve @handle to Channel ID

Cost: 1 unit per resolution

python3 ./scripts/youtube_channel_id.py --handle "@MetalSole"

2. youtube_channel_videos.py - List Channel Videos

Cost: 1-2 units for channel lookup + 1 unit per ~50 videos fetched

# By handle
python3 ./scripts/youtube_channel_videos.py --handle "@MetalSole" --max-results 50

# By channel ID (saves quota - skips handle resolution)
python3 ./scripts/youtube_channel_videos.py --channel-id "UC123..." --max-results 50

# By playlist ID (cheapest - fastest method)
python3 ./scripts/youtube_channel_videos.py --playlist-id "UU123..." --max-results 50

Read the full file on GitHub · 153 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.

2mo ago First seen · 153 lines · 40 tokens per session scan A 5c4fc127f784

Subscribe to this mod's changes

youtube-search is a skill published in the GitHub repository valtterimelkko/agent-workflow-skills (3 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 40 tokens to every session and 1,439 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 2026-08-31.

Claude Code Research agent-orchestration agent-skills pi-coding-agent skill-md

youtube-search next to 6 skills from other repositories
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youtube-searchvaltterimelkko/agent-workflow-skills	Skill	3	10d ago	MIT	A	40	Claude Code, Codex
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