Using Claude to find and clip exact moments on YouTube

• I ran the jobs in this order: the anime reactions, the Tesla reveal, the SpaceX question, then every mention of one creator. The first three ran both ways at the same time, in fresh sessions on the same model, Opus 5.5. The last ran both ways on the same day.
• Claude alone had web search, plus yt-dlp to search YouTube and read video details and captions. The Arcmira run used web search only to confirm what an event was.
• Extra Arcmira credits cost $0.002 each, so the SpaceX test’s 580 would be about $1.16.
• Setting it up took some fiddling. In the Claude desktop app the documented sign-in never showed up for me, and an API key set from the terminal didn’t reach sessions. Adding Arcmira by hand as a custom connector, the app’s way to plug in an outside tool, worked.
• Each Arcmira request is a small JavaScript program with a 30-second limit, and a few timed out.
• Both ways got timestamps wrong by up to 19 seconds, and Arcmira’s passage starts by up to 49. Re-timed from the captions’ word timings, all 47 quotes I tried were found word for word.

Timestamps marked * are where Arcmira’s passage starts, and the name is said within the next minute. The rest are the exact second, from YouTube’s captions.

The full list of 1,028 is here (JSON, with channel, views and length).

Why each side missed what the other found:

• Arcmira only searches its own index, which is podcasts and talk shows. None of the 1,028 search results came up in it, including all the reaction, tribute, breakdown and interview videos about him, and his own channel isn’t in it.
• YouTube’s search only reads titles and descriptions. The 16 episodes where Arcmira heard his name don’t mention him in either, so 35 searches never surfaced them.
• Finding spoken mentions alone means reading transcripts. Claude started pulling them for the 595 results whose titles don’t name him. YouTube blocked it before the first one (IpBlocked, then HTTP 429: Too Many Requests) after a day of heavy use, and it was still blocked half an hour later. I stopped there, because that wall is part of the result.

What the 340 credits bought: 25 spoken mentions in episodes nobody would think to open, 22 of them on Based Camp, plus Asmongold and the Endgame podcast. A search that returns 20 passages costs about 60 credits.

Was it thorough? No. It only covers Arcmira’s index. On the free plan it can’t show anything from the last 30 days, and filtering by dates is paid too, so Claude couldn’t page through the year cleanly. Claude guessed a thorough sweep of the index for one name would take about 1,500 credits. That’s more than a free month, or under a tenth of the Pro plan’s 20,000 credits for $20 a month. No number of credits adds the fan videos it doesn’t index, and their titles already show them.

A few things I noticed:

• Spelled correctly, its name lookup found nothing for “Skyebrows”. Spelled the way people say it, “Skybrows”, it found him.
• Its catalog of tagged mentions had 1 row for him. Searching the transcripts found 25.
• Its search always returns something. His song “Breathing Elon’s Musk” came back as Bloomberg calling SpaceX “a living, breathing animal”. Claude kept only passages that contain the name.
• The quotes are real. 14 of 14 checked against YouTube’s own captions matched word for word.

Every Arcmira call in this test:

The other tests on this page also used transcript(), sponsors(), episodes() and sponsored-only search. Still untested as of 16 October: momentum, recommendations, Premium transcripts and creating monitors.

• The flight: Starship Flight 13 was called off at the moment of launch on July 16, then flew on July 24. It put out 20 Starlink internet satellites, the ship made its softest splashdown yet, and the booster hit the water hard. For each video I asked for the sponsors and the creator’s main takeaway too.
• Sponsors, Claude alone: Outskill, Mammouth AI and Surfshark as ad reads in the captions, and BlueDot, Abacus AI and Incogni in descriptions. Most live streams and news channels had none.
• What slowed Claude alone down: YouTube refused most caption downloads after a burst (HTTP 429, too many requests), so it got captions for only 13 of 21 videos. It read the 4-to-6-hour live streams by keyword only.
• Shotwell, Claude alone: 14 confirmed mentions and about 12 likely ones, from the Starbase Louisiana announcement in August, the Q2 earnings call and Starlink Mobile. It guessed 50 to 150 with low confidence, because every new search kept finding more.
• Arcmira’s ranking was rough. It returns views only for a channel’s 25 newest indexed episodes, so it had view counts for just 4 of the 12.
• Sponsors, Arcmira: channel level only, from each channel’s sponsor history (All-In: OKX, Circle, Airwallex, AppLovin. Farzad: Rebellionaire. Limitless: Qualcomm). It couldn’t confirm the ad read in any single video, because the free plan won’t let a search end at a date (“The before filter requires Pro”).
• Shotwell, Arcmira: it matched her exactly (“President and COO of SpaceX”) and counted about 32 episodes across 16 channels, All-In 6 and Bloomberg Podcasts 4 among them. Four of its 15 listed mentions came back as “about her” without her name in the passage, and it marked those unverified.
• The credits: Arcmira charges 4 credits per row after the first 5, and two calls asked for up to 100 mention rows each.
• Its space coverage: it reported one NASASpaceflight video, indexed through 2025, and Marcus House only up to July 11. Its name lookup didn’t find Everyday Astronaut or Scott Manley at all.

The reveal was at SpaceX’s test site in McGregor, Texas. Only two of the 18 videos had a paid sponsor, AG1, and IONNA with Lincoln Electric. Arcmira’s search for anything after September 16 came back with freshness_requires_paid, an error saying results on the free plan stop at 2026-09-16 and anything newer requires Pro.

I also asked where my own name has come up, expecting never. Both said never on a podcast, from opposite sides. Claude alone found my own two uploads. Arcmira found no “Orelup” in anything said on the shows it indexes. A spoken mention with no written trace would only show up through Arcmira.

The scene: Senor Pink puts on his dead son’s baby bonnet for his wife Russian, who hasn’t responded to anything since an accident. Each clip runs from the bonnet to just after the smile.

• For one channel, the first caption match was the same smile remembered in the next episode, which is why the captions alone weren’t enough.
• Matching the episode’s own audio across videos failed completely. These channels shrink the anime into a blurred corner and change its sound, probably to get past YouTube’s copyright matching.
• Over 24 searches, Arcmira’s closest hit was one reaction channel 200 episodes short, and it holds no searchable videos for it.