Typed /video in the terminal. Pasted a YouTube link. Five minutes later - a full breakdown of a four-hour conference, organized by speaker. Use cases. Tools. Ready-made prompts for deep research.
No SaaS subscription. A 150-line markdown file in .claude/commands/, an n8n webhook, and Supadata API. Built it myself in 15 minutes. Well, the second version in 15. The first took 45, because I went the wrong way.
What are Claude Code custom commands
Take a markdown file. Drop it in .claude/commands/. Describe the task in plain language - what steps, what input, what output. Claude Code reads it and executes. No code required.
My /video file is ~150 lines. Inside:
- Which webhook to call for the transcript
- How to split the analysis by speaker
- What output files to create
- Prompts for Gemini Research - to dig into details per speaker
Prompt engineering, but not for a single prompt - for an entire workflow with steps and conditions.
How /video works
I type the command, give it a link. Claude Code hits the n8n webhook. Supadata API fetches the transcript - they have 100 free requests per month, which is enough for me. The text comes back straight to the terminal.
Then Claude Code follows the instructions in the command file:
- Splits the transcript by speaker
- Extracts use cases, tools, insights
- Creates
Analysis.mdwith the full breakdown - Generates Gemini Research prompts per speaker
A 4-hour conference with 8 speakers. Manually - a full day. With the command - 5 minutes of waiting.
The n8n part: 10 nodes
Workflow:
- Webhook
- Code Node to extract YouTube ID from URL
- Supadata API - transcript
- VTT to Text - conversion
- Return to Claude Code
~10 nodes. Set up in 20 minutes.
Fun part: Claude Code generates n8n workflows itself. Not perfect out of the box - had to tweak a couple nodes by hand. But it produced a working JSON that imports into n8n on the first try.
First version: 45 minutes and a fail
First two runs returned garbage - I forgot to describe the output structure. I tried to make the command too smart, with a bunch of conditions. Edge cases everywhere. That’s the wrong approach.
Sat down, rewrote from scratch. Simple instructions. One step, one line. Removed all the “if X, then check Y and account for Z” logic.
Worked. New version - 15 minutes including testing.
Why this matters for PMs
Describe a process in plain language - get a tool. Analyze 5 competitors at once. Prep for a demo. Break down user interviews. Research a topic.
Before, you’d need subscriptions to a bunch of SaaS tools at $30/month each. Now - a markdown file and 15 minutes.
What I learned
Claude Code custom commands aren’t about programming. They’re about formalizing processes. If you can explain a task in words, you can build a command. And for more complex workflows, there are autonomous operation frameworks - Superpowers, spec-kit, Claude Flow.
While writing /video, I rethought how I analyze video content in general. What data is actually useful after a conference, and what’s just noise that piles up in notes. Settled on use cases and tools, because that’s what I actually apply at work.