I got tired of rewatching YouTube videos for notes, so I made a Claude Code command that dumps them straight into Obsidian
I keep watching long YouTube videos and forgetting half of what was useful by the next day. Re-scrubbing through a 90-minute talk to find one quote is miserable.
So I wrote a small Claude Code slash command that does the boring part for me. Paste a URL, get a structured note in my vault.
What it does:
- Pulls the transcript with yt-dlp (no API key, no scraping pain)
- Hands it to Claude with the metadata
- Writes a markdown file straight into <vault>/YouTube/ with YAML frontmatter, TL;DR, key ideas with timestamped quotes, a chapter table, action items, mentioned resources, and a few [[wikilinks]] for related notes
Usage is just:
/youtube-to-notes [https://youtu.be/xxxx](https://youtu.be/xxxx)
There are a few style flags if you want something specific:
\- --style=brief for a short summary
\- --style=actionable leads with things to actually do
\- --style=study adds Q/A flashcards at the bottom
Install is one line. Windows:
iwr -useb https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ExPl0iT-29/youtube-to-notes/main/install.ps1 | iex
macOS/Linux:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ExPl0iT-29/youtube-to-notes/main/install.sh | bash
The installer drops the command file into ~/.claude/commands/, installs yt-dlp and ffmpeg if you don't have them, and asks for your vault path so it knows where to save.