The guide · install a skill

The YouTube agent skill: eleven Claude skills for your channel.

youtube-agent-skill is a free pack of eleven Claude skills by Jake Schincariol. It writes scripts with a scored hook, checks your title and thumbnail together, turns a transcript into an edit list, reads your retention data and finds the Shorts hiding in a long video. Free, MIT licence, no signup, no API key.

It never publishes. Every skill ends with something you copy and a question: ship it, or change it? You upload.

What you need

The repo github.com/Jakeschincariol/youtube-agent-skill.
Claude Code claude.com/product/claude-code. No Claude Code? You can paste a single SKILL.md into a Claude chat, but you lose the Python tools.
Python 3 six of the skills run small Python scripts. No extra packages needed. Macs already have it.

The eleven skills

Command	What it does
`/yt-script`	One idea into a script. Five hooks off 21 formulas, scored, then the spoken script with the retention beats marked.
`/yt-package`	Title and thumbnail as one pairing, checked for truncation, duplication and vagueness.
`/yt-edit`	A transcript into an edit decision list: dead air, filler, retakes, with timecodes.
`/yt-comment`	Sorts your comments into four piles, writes replies in your voice and says which one to pin.
`/yt-plan`	A week that fits the hours you actually have: one anchor video, one quick one, three Shorts.
`/yt-viral`	What is working in your niche, ranked by how far each video beat its own channel's median.
`/yt-retention`	Reads your retention export: where people leave in the hook, the sharp drops, the slow slide, and what to change.
`/yt-shorts`	Finds the Shorts already inside a long video and writes a new first line for each.
`/yt-seo`	The description, the few tags worth having, and the three searches this video should win.
`/yt-chapters`	Chapters from a transcript, checked against YouTube's rules so they actually show.
`/yt-audit`	Looks at the whole channel and ends with ONE fix, not twenty.

How to use it, plus starter prompts

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Install the skills

The easy way: paste this into Claude Code and let it do the work. It's the install prompt from the repo.

https://github.com/Jakeschincariol/youtube-agent-skill

Install this skill, then confirm /yt-script works.

Or install it yourself. Pick one of these. The first copies the skills in globally, so they work in every project:

git clone https://github.com/Jakeschincariol/youtube-agent-skill.git
cp -r youtube-agent-skill/skills/yt-* ~/.claude/skills/

Or as a plugin, typed inside Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add Jakeschincariol/youtube-agent-skill
/plugin install youtube-agent@youtube-agent-skill

Restart Claude Code, then type /yt and you should see all eleven.

Write your voice file first

Spend ten minutes here. Every skill reads ~/.claude/youtube/voice.md: how you talk on camera, the words you never use, who you're talking to, what you won't claim. It matters more for YouTube than anywhere else, because you have to say the script out loud. Copy the repo's voice.md template and fill it in, or hand Claude three of your videos with Prompt 1 below.

Script the next video

Give /yt-script one idea. It writes five hooks from 21 formulas, scores each with hookscore.py, then writes the spoken script with the retention beats marked. The score is a rough guide, not a prediction: a low one means look again, a high one isn't a promise.

Package it

Run /yt-package before you design the thumbnail. It treats the title and thumbnail text as one pair, so they don't say the same thing twice, and flags titles that get cut off. Then /yt-seo for the description and /yt-chapters once you have a transcript.

Edit, cut Shorts, read the data

After recording, export your transcript as an .srt and run /yt-edit for a cut list with timecodes, then /yt-shorts for the Shorts inside it. Once the video has been up a few days, download its retention data (Studio → the video → Analytics → Engagement → the retention chart → download → "Audience retention") and give it to /yt-retention with the transcript.

Prompt 1: build your voice file

Paste links to three of your own videos, the ones that sound most like you.

Write my ~/.claude/youtube/voice.md from these three videos of mine:
[link 1]
[link 2]
[link 3]

Use the template in the youtube-agent-skill repo. Capture how I actually talk on camera: sentence length, words and phrases I repeat, words I never use, who I'm talking to, and anything I won't claim. Quote real lines from the videos as examples. Show me the file before you save it.

Prompt 2: your next script

/yt-script
Idea: [one sentence, e.g. "I let Claude edit my videos for a week and here's what broke"]
Length: [8] minutes
Audience: [who this is for, e.g. solo creators who've never used Claude Code]

Give me the five hooks with their scores first and wait for me to pick one before you write the script.

Prompt 3: title and thumbnail

/yt-package
Here's the script: [paste it, or the file path]
My working title: [title]
Thumbnail idea: [what's in the image and the words on it]

Give me three title + thumbnail-text pairs, linted, and tell me which one you'd ship and why.

Prompt 4: find what's working in your niche

/yt-viral
My niche: [e.g. AI tools for small businesses]
Channels to compare: [3 to 5 channel URLs]

Rank their recent videos by how far each beat its own channel's median, show me the top 10 with the hook formula each one used, and suggest three ideas for my channel based on them.

Prompt 5: Shorts from a long video

/yt-shorts
Transcript: [path to transcript.srt]

Find every Short worth cutting from this video. For each one give me the start and end timecodes, a new first line written for Shorts, and why it works on its own.

Prompt 6: why people stopped watching

/yt-retention
Retention export: [path to retention.csv]
Transcript: [path to transcript.srt]
Video length: [10:00]

Tell me the hook leak, the cliffs with what I was saying at each one, and the slide. Then give me the single change that would have helped most.

Good to know

Nothing publishes the skills write and you upload. Nothing logs into your YouTube account.
No made-up numbers if a skill needs a figure it doesn't have, it asks you or leaves it out.
Reads, doesn't scrape /yt-viral only looks at public listings. It never logs in as you.
Tags barely matter the pack says so, and /yt-seo keeps them short.
Run /yt-audit monthly it looks at the whole channel and hands back one fix. Do that fix before asking for another.

Credit: the YouTube agent skill pack is by Jake Schincariol (opusjake.ai), free under the MIT licence. Get it, star it and follow updates at github.com/Jakeschincariol/youtube-agent-skill. This guide links to it and doesn't redistribute it.