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[ARTICLE · art-51080] src=pub.towardsai.net ↗ pub= topic=artificial-intelligence verified=true sentiment=↑ positive

Claude Couldn’t Watch Videos. One Developer Fixed that With a Clever Trick — Here’s How It Works

Developer Brad Bonanno created an open-source skill called /watch that enables Claude AI to analyze YouTube videos by slicing them into frames and audio, overcoming the AI's inability to process video directly. The tool, hosted on GitHub under MIT license, has gained around 2,500 stars and addresses a key limitation in AI video understanding.

read1 min views1 publishedJul 8, 2026
Claude Couldn’t Watch Videos. One Developer Fixed that With a Clever Trick — Here’s How It Works
Image: Pub (auto-discovered)

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Here’s a gap in AI tools you’ve probably bumped into without naming it. Claude can read a webpage, write and run code, browse a whole repository — but paste it a YouTube link, and it’s suddenly useless. As the creator of this tool puts it in his own README: out of the box, Claude “has to either guess from the title or pull a transcript that’s missing 90% of what’s on screen.”

Think about how much information lives in video that a transcript never captures: the code on the presenter’s screen, the exact moment a UI breaks in a bug recording, what’s actually shown during the first three seconds of a viral clip. All invisible to your AI.

A developer named Brad Bonanno — a YouTuber who builds AI automation for businesses — got tired of this and shipped a fix: an open-source skill called

(repo: bradautomates/claude-video, MIT license). It's free, it's picked up around 2,500 GitHub stars, and the way it works is a genuinely clever…/watch

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