Reviving a YouTube Summariser with CLI Support and Model Upgrades
I want to take a pretty simple idea from a project I did about nine months ago. It’s a YouTube summariser I built mostly through vibe coding, and I haven’t touched the codebase since — it’s just been sitting on GitHub at: https://github.com/weijianzhg/youtube-summariser (MIT Licensed)
Now I’m realising it’d be cool to add a new feature: support for the command line (CLI), not just a web UI. Basically, I want to open a terminal, paste in a YouTube link, and have it summarise the content to the right length.
I also bumped up the token limit since the newer models can handle more tokens now, though that might change later. And lastly, I want to upgrade the models and do a comparison, specifically, test the latest OpenAI model against the newer Claude models, which is supposed to be really fast with solid performance.
I’ve also added a really simple config.yml so users can specify the model name and the max tokens to use. It’s a simple tool, but honestly pretty helpful.
For me, the main use case is that there’s a lot of great educational content on YouTube, but many videos are like 30 minutes to an hour long, and I just don’t have time to sit through all of them. I like the idea of having those videos summarised in words instead.
As a next step, I’m thinking about building some kind of connections or visualisation layer on top of the summaries: something that helps show how different ideas relate to each other. I think that could be really useful, but I need to think more about how to approach it.