Claude skills for YouTube exist, they are free, and the best-known pack is the YouTube Agent Skill: 11 MIT-licensed Claude Code skills by developer Jake Schincariol that draft scripts, titles, edit lists, Shorts clips, SEO and chapters from material you paste in. It is a community project, not an Anthropic product, and it connects to nothing: no login, no API key, and nothing is published until you upload it yourself. The first reel below covers what the pack is and how to install it; the second shows what 6 of the 11 skills produced when I ran them on my own footage. The presenter in the reel is an AI avatar of Hammad; the words and facts are his.
What the YouTube Agent Skill is, and what it is not
The repo is github.com/Jakeschincariol/youtube-agent-skill. It was created on 16 September 2026, has a single commit (a2feb21), and had 4,066 stars when I checked the GitHub API on 1 November 2026. The pack is 11 SKILL.md files, 6 small Python helpers that import only the standard library and make no network calls, a hooks.json with 21 hook formulas and a plugin manifest. What it is not matters just as much: it does not log into your channel, it does not need a YouTube API key, and every skill ends with the same gate, you ship it or change it.
The 11 Claude Code skills, one job each
/yt-script takes one idea, writes 5 hooks against the 21 formulas, scores them 0 to 100, keeps the top 2 and then writes the spoken script beat by beat with on-screen notes. /yt-package writes 10 titles, lints them together with your thumbnail text and writes a thumbnail brief, not an image. /yt-edit turns a timestamped transcript into an edit decision list of dead air, filler and repeats with timecodes; in its own words, it does not touch media. /yt-comment sorts comments you paste into questions, corrections, praise and bait and drafts short replies. /yt-plan sizes a week to your hours: one anchor video, one quick video, three Shorts. /yt-viral ranks videos you collect by how far each beat its own channel's median and names the title formula. /yt-retention reads a YouTube Studio retention CSV and suggests one fix, /yt-shorts finds 20 to 55 second clips in a transcript, /yt-seo writes the description, tags and 3 target queries, /yt-chapters writes chapters checked against YouTube's rules, and /yt-audit ends in a single fix.
How to install the Claude skills for YouTube
Claude Code needs a paid Claude plan (Pro or Max). The quick route is the one in the reel: open Claude Code, paste the repo link and ask it to install the skills into ~/.claude/skills, approving each command as it runs. The manual route is git clone, mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills, then copy the yt-* folders in; the README's copy command fails on a fresh machine without that mkdir. Type /yt-script to start, and run /reload-skills if the folder did not exist when your session began. You can also install it as a plugin, in which case the commands are namespaced as /youtube-agent:yt-script. On the free Claude plan you can zip each skill folder and upload it under Customize > Skills with code execution turned on, but the skills that borrow a sibling folder's tool (chapters, viral, shorts, audit) break when uploaded one at a time. The Claude Code skills docs cover the paths and live reload.
ONE TACTIC A WEEK
Tested: what 6 of the 11 skills produced on my own footage
I ran 6 skills in a sandbox project. /yt-script wrote 5 hooks against the 21 formulas and scored them; the author calls the scorer a heuristic, not a predictor. My best opener scored 46, flagged for weak stakes, and the rewrite scored 82. /yt-package wrote 10 titles, linted them for the 60 and 40 character cuts with a top score of 94, and wrote a thumbnail brief. Its pairing check is worth knowing: thumbnail words that repeated the title scored 80, different words scored 98. /yt-edit turned the transcript of the reel's own raw take into a cut list of 18 dead-air cuts totalling 2.02 seconds, without touching the video file.
/yt-comment sorted 5 real comments from my channel into 1 question, 2 keyword requests and 2 bait, drafted replies and said which one to pin. /yt-plan asked two questions first; I said about 3 hours, and it planned one anchor video, one quick video and three Shorts cut from the anchor. /yt-viral ranked 80 public videos from 6 AI channels by views over each channel's own median. The top outlier, at 15.0x, had an I tested title, and it pitched I ran the free YouTube skill pack on my own channel as my next video. I have not run /yt-retention, /yt-shorts, /yt-seo, /yt-chapters or /yt-audit yet, so I make no claims about those.
Three things to check before you install
First, read the code and pin it. It is one developer's repo with a single commit, and lookalike re-uploads with the same name exist, so install only from the original owner's URL and pin to commit a2feb21. Second, collect video data the right way. /yt-viral suggests yt-dlp for gathering lists, but YouTube's Terms forbid automated access with scrapers; the official YouTube Data API, with its 10,000 unit daily quota, or a list you build by hand, keeps you clean. Borrow the title structure, never the video. Third, if you write in Arabic, the title linter only matches ASCII text, so Arabic titles break it; a fix is pending in pull request 43 but had not been merged when I checked. Strip usernames before pasting comments.
Get the setup guide and prompts
The free guide at withhammad.com/resources/youtube-agent-skill-claude has the install commands, the plugin route, the free-plan route and four copy-paste prompts for installing, scripting, packaging and safe outlier research. On Instagram, comment SKILL on the first reel or YOUTUBE on the tested reel and the guide link arrives by DM (follow @withhammad.ai first so the DM reaches you).
Related reading
If this is useful, see 27 free installs to set up Claude for LinkedIn and how to scan Claude skills before you install them.