youtube-content-ops

YouTube Content Operations

Generate titles, descriptions, and tags matching channel brand style. All publish actions require user confirmation.

Prerequisites

• Full Access: yutu CLI (eat-pray-ai/yutu) — read + write via YouTube API
• Read-Only: youtube_transcript_api CLI (pip install youtube-transcript-api) — transcript fetch only

At session start, detect mode:

yutu channel list --output json 2>/dev/null && echo "FULL" || \
  (youtube_transcript_api --help >/dev/null 2>&1 && echo "READ_ONLY" || echo "NONE")

Authentication Failure — Hard Stop

If any yutu command returns an auth error (token expired, invalid credentials, authError, 401, 403), stop the current task immediately. Do NOT:

• Retry the command
• Fall back to web fetch, curl, or any other HTTP workaround to scrape YouTube pages
• Attempt to refresh or regenerate tokens automatically
• Continue the workflow in read-only mode without telling the user

Instead:

1. Report the auth failure to the user with the exact error message
2. Tell the user to re-run yutu auth --credential client_secret.json
3. Wait for the user to confirm re-authentication before resuming

This applies to every step of the workflow — transcript fetch, video update, search, etc. An expired token is not a "find a workaround" situation; it is a "stop and ask the user to fix it" situation.

Workflow

1. Brand Guide

Check for ./[channel-name]-brand-guide.md. If missing, generate from recent videos and confirm with user. Template: references/brand-guide-template.md.

2. Fetch Transcript

Full Access:

yutu caption list --videoId VIDEO_ID --output json
yutu caption download --id CAPTION_ID --file /tmp/caption.txt --tfmt srt

Read-Only (extract video ID from URL yourself — supports youtube.com/watch?v=, youtu.be/, shorts/, embed/):

youtube_transcript_api VIDEO_ID --languages en zh --format text

Fallback: ask user for transcript.

3. Analyze & Generate

From transcript, extract topic, key highlights, target audience, keywords.

Apply brand guide tokens: title_format, title_separator, tone, banned_phrases, primary_tags, footer_full.

Generate:

• 3 title options with rationale
• Description (hook + highlights + CTA + footer)
• 5–10 tags

4. User Review (MANDATORY)

Present content. Never publish without explicit user confirmation.

5. Apply

Full Access (after confirmation):

yutu video update --id VIDEO_ID --title "Title" --description "Description" --tags "t1,t2,t3"

Read-Only: User copies to YouTube Studio manually.

References

• references/brand-guide-template.md — Brand guide format
• references/brand-guide-generation.md — Auto-generation from channel history
• references/yutu-commands.md — Full yutu CLI reference
• references/pre-publish-checklist.md — Review checklist