Youtube Advisor

What it feels like

You: build an advisor on @ycombinator,
     last 200 videos, hiring + fundraising

AI:  ✓ Resolving @ycombinator (200 videos)
     ✓ Fetching transcripts (3 min)
     ✓ Indexing + embedding
     ✓ Advisor ready: /yc-advisor

You: /yc-advisor how should I think about hiring my first engineer?
AI:  → answer with quoted videos and timestamps

Install

Paste this in your AI chat (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex CLI, etc.):

Install youtube-advisor for me. PyPI: pip install youtube-advisor. For Claude Code skill discovery, also clone https://github.com/AlexanderAbramovPav/youtube-advisor into ~/.claude/skills/youtube-advisor/.

The AI installs the CLI from PyPI, makes the skill discoverable in ~/.claude/skills/, checks ffmpeg and uv. You walk away.

Or just install the CLI for scripting (no AI integration):

pip install youtube-advisor

You get the youtube-advisor command. See Advanced for CLI usage.

Use it

Create an advisor. Drop a channel URL or handle in chat with a one-sentence intent:

build an advisor on @ycombinator from the last 200 videos,
focused on hiring and fundraising

make an advisor on @lexfridman, interviews from 2024 onwards

The assistant resolves the channel, fetches transcripts, builds indices, drafts the advisor's voice, and runs a self-check. No flags, no paths, no shell. You get a new slash command like /yc-advisor.

Ask the advisor.

/yc-advisor how should I think about hiring my first engineer?

Every answer comes back with verbatim quotes and clickable timestamps linking to the exact second of the source.

Refresh later. One sentence:

refresh @ycombinator — check for new videos this week

The assistant replays your original selection filter, fetches only what's new, re-indexes the delta, and tells you what changed.

Why

• Local-first. Transcripts and indices live on your disk. No SaaS account, no per-query fees, no vendor that can take your corpus offline.
• Verbatim quotes with timestamps. Every answer is grounded in real transcript text and links to youtube.com/watch?v=ID&t=SECONDS — click and the video opens at that exact second.
• Uses your AI's brain. Skill drafting and answering run through whatever assistant you're already using — nothing extra to configure.
• Free captions when available; local Whisper when not. A three-tier cascade keeps cost near zero and falls back to on-device transcription only when YouTube has none.
• Incremental updates that respect your filter. Your original selection (channel + date range + title filters + max count) is saved and replayed on every refresh.

What an answer looks like

"The scariest fundraising stories are the ones where the founder spends six months on an 'almost-yes' from an investor who eventually just ghosts."

— Dalton & Michael: Fundraising Mistakes (2024-03-12), 14:22

Each citation is a real line from a real video, anchored to the second. Click through and verify.

Limitations

• One channel per advisor. Multi-channel rollups ("YC + Naval + a16z combined") are planned for v0.2.
• Whisper fallback is CPU-bound. Videos without YT captions fall back to local Whisper — roughly 1 hour of compute per 1 hour of audio on Apple Silicon. The assistant warns you and asks before going that route.
• YouTube anti-bot. Defaults (1–5s randomized sleep, exponential-backoff retries on 429) handle most cases. On persistent blocks the assistant will offer to use cookies from your logged-in browser.

Works with other AI tools

AGENTS.md is a tool-agnostic mirror of SKILL.md. Wire it into whichever tool you use:

Everything below is for power users running outside an AI chat (CI, cron, scripts). You almost never need this.

Manual install

git clone https://github.com/AlexanderAbramovPav/youtube-advisor ~/.claude/skills/youtube-advisor
cd ~/.claude/skills/youtube-advisor && bash scripts/install.sh

CLI

# Bootstrap
youtube-advisor bootstrap \
  --channel @ycombinator \
  --since 2022-01-01 \
  --max 200 \
  --title-include "Founder Stories|How to" \
  --title-exclude "shorts|#shorts" \
  --out ~/.claude/skills/yc-advisor \
  --yes

# Update (replays the saved selection filter)
youtube-advisor update --advisor ~/.claude/skills/yc-advisor --yes

# Update — override date, reindex only, or run regression evals
youtube-advisor update --advisor ~/.claude/skills/yc-advisor --since 2026-01-01 --yes
youtube-advisor update --advisor ~/.claude/skills/yc-advisor --reindex-only
youtube-advisor update --advisor ~/.claude/skills/yc-advisor --run-evals --yes

youtube-advisor bootstrap --help and youtube-advisor update --help print the full flag list.

Bypassing YT anti-bot with browser cookies

When unauthenticated channel-resolution gets 429-blocked, pass cookies from a logged-in browser. yt-dlp reads them straight from the browser profile — no copy-paste:

youtube-advisor bootstrap --channel @ycombinator --out ~/.claude/skills/yc-advisor \
  --cookies-from-browser chrome --yes

# Or a Netscape-format cookies.txt:
youtube-advisor bootstrap --channel @ycombinator --out ~/.claude/skills/yc-advisor \
  --cookies ~/secrets/yt-cookies.txt --yes

Resolution order: explicit flag → YOUTUBE_ADVISOR_COOKIES_BROWSER / YOUTUBE_ADVISOR_COOKIES_FILE env → ~/.config/youtube-advisor/cookies.txt if present → none. With cookies set the captions pool stays at concurrency 8; without them it drops to 2 + per-call jitter so YT is less likely to block you.

Vendoring _lib

youtube-advisor bootstrap --vendor copies the youtube_advisor Python package into the emitted advisor's scripts/_lib/. Useful if you want the advisor directory to be fully portable (pushed to a separate Git repo and cloned elsewhere without a Python install of youtube-advisor).

Eval-driven regression detection

youtube-advisor update --advisor <path> --run-evals reruns the channel's generated benchmark after sync and prompts to roll back if pass rate dropped.

License

MIT — © 2026 Alexander Abramov.

Runtime dependencies (yt-dlp, youtube-transcript-api, fastembed, faster-whisper, rank-bm25, ffmpeg, scriba) are installed locally, not vendored. Their licenses are catalogued in THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.md.

Acknowledgments

This tool is glue around several excellent OSS projects:

• yt-dlp — channel resolution, caption download, audio extraction.
• youtube-transcript-api — Jonas Depoix — Tier 1 captions fetcher.
• fastembed — Qdrant — local embedding inference with bge-small-en-v1.5 (BAAI).
• rank-bm25 — Dorian Brown — BM25 ranking.
• faster-whisper — SYSTRAN — local ASR fallback.
• scriba — sibling skill — alternative Whisper transcription backend.
• uv (Astral) for env setup, and ffmpeg for audio extraction.
• Conceptual lineage: yc-avisor — the hand-rolled YC-channel-specific predecessor.