Following on from my MCP to skills post earlier today - My ADHD has been firing and I've spun up another one haha.

This time it's for YouTube transcripts. Same problem as before - Claude's sandbox runs from cloud IPs which YouTube blocks, so you can't just hit the transcript API directly. My residential proxy setup fixes that - now Claude can also come along for the ride when you're 3 hours into a conspiracy rabbithole.

What it does:

You give Claude a YouTube URL (or video ID) and it fetches the transcript - either with timestamps or as plain text. Supports multiple languages too if the video has different caption tracks available.

Use cases:

• "Summarise this 2 hour podcast for me"
• "What does this tutorial say about X?"
• "Create study notes from this lecture"
• "Find the timestamp where they talk about Y"

Basically anything where you want Claude to actually read a YouTube video instead of just guessing based on the title.

How it works:

Small FastAPI container running on my home network, exposed via Cloudflare Tunnel. Uses the youtube-transcript-api Python library under the hood. Token auth + domain gets whitelisted in Claude's network settings.

Also, no API keys, no Google Cloud Platform fucking around, no OAuth setup. It's completely authless. Spin up the container, point a tunnel at it, done.

The skill file just teaches Claude which endpoints to hit and how to auth - same pattern as my other proxy-based skills.

GitHub: https://github.com/abra5umente/youtube-transcript-api

Includes an example skill file you can customise with your own domain/token.

Between this and the Reddit skill I can now ask Claude to summarise videos and check what people are saying about them on Reddit, all from my phone. Living in the future, AGI is here, etc.

Anyone else found that MCP is basically superseded by skills at this point? The only benefit MCP has is... I don't even know now? lol