A 20-minute YouTube tutorial was on my list. I never pressed play. One slash command downloaded it, cut it into 80 frames, read all 565 transcript segments — and then three research agents fact-checked the video's money claims. Spoiler: the numbers were ~4× inflated.
I'd seen a video claiming Claude Code could watch videos, so I asked mine if it had a fetch tool or a YouTube MCP. It didn't — and said so. Then it did something better: it pulled the video's auto-captions in one Python call and summarized the whole thing in seconds. Text only. No frames. And honest about exactly that limit.
Before installing anything, I made Claude prove the upgrade was worth it. It rebuilt the pipeline by hand — yt-dlp download, ffmpeg cut into 80 frames, frames + transcript fed back to itself as one multimodal prompt. The frames caught what the transcript never said: on-screen comparison tables, UI details, even that the video's intro was itself made with the same /watch skill, run on a different video.
Two slash commands installed the plugin: marketplace add, then install. Then I pasted my first /watch URL and got… "Unknown command: /watch. Did you mean /batch?" The plugin was fully installed — config confirmed it. The catch: plugin slash commands load once, at session start. Installing mid-session means the running session never hears about it. Restart, and it just works.
Bonus glitch from the same session: the video's auto-captions mangled the name of a keyword tool into clearer. The frames + a research agent revealed it was actually LowFruits.io. If we'd trusted the transcript alone, the episode's best takeaway would have pointed at a tool that doesn't exist.
Everything below came out of a single /watch run on a 20-minute video I never played. Tap any image to enlarge it and read exactly how it was produced.
This is the part watching can't give you. After the summary, I asked Claude to spin up research agents on the video's claims. Verdict: real traffic ~2.6M visits/mo (not 11M), realistic revenue $15–50K/mo (not $500K), and the video was one of 8–10 near-identical "boring website" videos — a coordinated affiliate push paying up to 60% commission. The business model is real. The headline numbers are hype. I learned more than the video knew about itself — by not watching it.
Yes — an episode about not watching videos, as a video. Watch it. Or don't: run /watch on it and tell me what my own frames say.
The /watch skill is free and open-source (by Brad — credit where due). It needs yt-dlp + ffmpeg on your machine, and optionally a Groq or OpenAI key for the Whisper fallback when a video has no captions. Everything in this episode is free and open — install it, point it at any video, make it yours.
/plugin marketplace add bradautomates/claude-video && /plugin install watch@claude-video
No GitHub? Comment WATCH on the post and the bot DMs you the link.
A command that watches videos is one card in a much bigger deck. Next: I batch-generated 18 gamified "unlock cards" for my whole operator setup — from my phone, on the couch, in one Telegram session.
