Show HN: Bullshit Detector – agent skills that fact-check videos and articles

Serhii Korniienko released Bullshit Detector, a set of open-source agent skills that fact-check viral YouTube videos, articles, tweets, and PDFs by producing a claim-by-claim verification report with sources and a BS score from 0 to 10. The skills are written in plain markdown and self-contained Python, work with Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, and other agent harnesses, and were built using Claude Code to help audit AI hype.

Agent skills that fact-check the internet. Point your agent at a viral YouTube video, article, tweet, or PDF — get a claim-by-claim verification report with sources and a BS score 0–10 instead of taking "10 WAYS TO MAKE MONEY WITH AI 🤯" at face value. Portable Agent Skills https://agentskills.io — plain markdown + self-contained Python. They work in Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, and any harness that supports the skills format and has web search. Built in the open with Claude Code https://claude.com/claude-code — an AI helped build the tool that fact-checks AI hype, and the example report /SerhiiKorniienko/bullshit-detector/blob/main/examples/report-14-ways-to-make-money-with-ai.md is it auditing its own kind. Follow @SerhiiFounder https://x.com/SerhiiFounder for new skills and fact-check experiments, or join the newsletter https://korniienko.dev/newsletter to get them in your inbox. - Install uv https://docs.astral.sh/uv/ if you don't have it the fetch script uses it to self-resolve its dependencies . - Run the skills.sh installer and pick the skills and agents you want: npx skills@latest add SerhiiKorniienko/bullshit-detector - Ask your agent: "is this bullshit? <url " , "fact-check this video" , "summarize <url " , "explain the part at 12:30" . Prefer a managed bundle that updates when a new version ships, instead of copied files you maintain yourself? Inside Claude Code: /plugin marketplace add SerhiiKorniienko/bullshit-detector /plugin install bullshit-detector@serhii-korniienko Two ways to install, two philosophies: copies the skills into your setup so you can hack on them and make them your own. Works with any agent Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, … . skills.sh https://skills.sh/SerhiiKorniienko/bullshit-detector The plugin keeps them as a read-only, always-current bundle — best when you just want it to work and follow along as it evolves. Claude Code only. Pick one, not both — installing both gives Claude Code two copies of every skill. Works beyond Claude Code — the skills are plain markdown + self-contained scripts. Full walkthroughs with caveats per surface live in SETUP.md : | Agent / app | Support | Guide | |---|---|---| | Claude Code CLI | ✅ everything | | SETUP.md → Code tab /SerhiiKorniienko/bullshit-detector/blob/main/SETUP.md claude-desktop-app-code-tab SETUP.md → Chat /SerhiiKorniienko/bullshit-detector/blob/main/SETUP.md claude-desktop-and-claudeai-chat SETUP.md → OpenAI Codex /SerhiiKorniienko/bullshit-detector/blob/main/SETUP.md openai-codex SETUP.md → ChatGPT /SerhiiKorniienko/bullshit-detector/blob/main/SETUP.md chatgpt SETUP.md → Other agents /SerhiiKorniienko/bullshit-detector/blob/main/SETUP.md other-agents A finance guy with 1M views tells you the "only 14 ways to make money with AI". How much of it is real? Views, production value, and confidence are not evidence. The fix is boring: extract every claim, check each against independent sources, and score what survives. That's exactly the work agents with web search are good at and humans never bother doing. The fix: bullshit-detector /SerhiiKorniienko/bullshit-detector/blob/main/skills/analysis/bullshit-detector/SKILL.md — per-claim verdicts ✅ confirmed / 🟡 plausible / 🟠 misleading / ❌ false / ❓ unverifiable , a hype-signal scan, an incentive analysis "who benefits if you believe this" , and a 0–10 BS score. Verdicts require sources — the skill forbids confirming or refuting from model memory alone. Your agent can't sit through a 27-minute video, and YouTube's official API won't give you captions for videos you don't own. Same story with tweets $100/mo API and paywalled articles. The fix: fetch-content /SerhiiKorniienko/bullshit-detector/blob/main/skills/ingestion/fetch-content/SKILL.md — one script that turns any URL into clean text + metadata with no API keys: YouTube transcripts and TikTok captions via yt-dlp, articles via readability extraction, PDFs, tweets via free endpoints. Every failure mode produces an actionable hint paywall → paste, no captions → Whisper instead of a silent guess. Ingestion and analysis are different jobs. Scripts do the deterministic work fetch, parse, normalize ; the agent does the reasoning extract claims, search, judge . Because analysis skills only ever see normalized text + metadata, adding TikTok support one day touches zero analysis logic — and the same detector works on a tweet and a 3-hour podcast. A real run against a 1.16M-view "make money with AI" video: examples/report-14-ways-to-make-money-with-ai.md . BS score: 5/10 — real tools, real trends, guru math, and a funnel every four minutes.12 claims verified: 4 confirmed, 2 plausible, 3 misleading, 0 false, 3 unverifiable. Among the catches: "Renaissance, D.E. Shaw, Two Sigma only trade employees' money" true for one fund of one firm , and marketplace stats sourced from the marketplace's own PR. And a TikTok run — a 552K-view "our Sun has a hidden twin" video: examples/report-second-sun-binary-star.md BS score: 9/10 — real astronomy vocabulary stitched onto a fabricated cosmology . Yes, TikTok works — ask the same way: "is this bullshit? https://vt.tiktok.com/…" . How it works under the hood: - Built-in captions first. Most TikToks ship with creator or auto-generated captions. Thescript handles this natively — TikTok URLs including fetch-content vt.tiktok.com short links return a timestamped transcript plus views/likes/reposts, no video download. The same thing by hand: uvx yt-dlp --list-subs <tiktok-url check what's available uvx yt-dlp --write-subs --sub-langs "eng-US" --skip-download <tiktok-url grab the .vtt - No captions? Whisper fallback. For caption-less TikToks and Reels there's a validated local-transcription prototype mlx-whisper on Apple Silicon, no system ffmpeg needed — PyAV decodes the audio graduating from skills/in-progress /SerhiiKorniienko/bullshit-detector/blob/main/skills/in-progress/README.md as the transcribe skill. Use whisper-large-v3-turbo — smaller models garble words badly enough to break claim extraction. The analysis side doesn't care either way — the detector sees normalized text + metadata whether it came from a 7-minute TikTok or a 3-hour podcast that's design principle 3 3-separation-of-fetching-and-judging . All skills are model-invoked : you can call them explicitly, and the agent also reaches for them when your request fits "is this legit?" triggers the detector . Reason about content. Source-agnostic — they never care where the text came from. — Extract every claim, verify each against independent sources via web search, scan for hype signals, produce a report card with per-claim verdicts and a 0–10 BS score. bullshit-detector /SerhiiKorniienko/bullshit-detector/blob/main/skills/analysis/bullshit-detector/SKILL.md — Structured TLDR with timestamped key points, notable quotes, and an honest "worth your time?" call. summarize /SerhiiKorniienko/bullshit-detector/blob/main/skills/analysis/summarize/SKILL.md — ELI5 → deep-dive explanation of the content or any concept in it, with a jargon glossary and the prerequisites the original assumes. explain /SerhiiKorniienko/bullshit-detector/blob/main/skills/analysis/explain/SKILL.md Turn any source into clean text + metadata. — YouTube transcripts, TikTok captions, articles, PDFs, tweets, local files. One script, auto-detects source, no API keys. fetch-content /SerhiiKorniienko/bullshit-detector/blob/main/skills/ingestion/fetch-content/SKILL.md Turn reports into shareable output. — Ready-to-paste posts for X thread/single , LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, Hacker News, or a newsletter — plus a branded image carousel: 1080×1350 PNGs for X/Instagram and the PDF that LinkedIn document posts want. share /SerhiiKorniienko/bullshit-detector/blob/main/skills/publishing/share/SKILL.md See skills/in-progress /SerhiiKorniienko/bullshit-detector/blob/main/skills/in-progress/README.md : compare same topic across sources — who's right? , transcribe Whisper for caption-less TikTok/Reels — working mlx-whisper prototype landed, SKILL.md pending , X thread walking. I'm building these skills in the open — new detectors, adapters, and real fact-check reports as they land. - Follow @SerhiiFounder https://x.com/SerhiiFounder on X Join the newsletter https://korniienko.dev/newsletter — a short weekly-ish email, no spam, unsubscribe anytime MIT