I’ve been experimenting with OpenClaw (formerly known as ClawdBot and MoltBot), an AI agent that can interact with your system and various online services. For security and testing reasons, I chose to run it on a VPS rather than on my local machine. That extra layer of isolation felt important, especially when giving an autonomous agent any meaningful level of access. As it turns out, this came with a tradeoff, so that I had to create an OpenClaw YouTube summary skill.
Yes, it is Overhyped
Let me be upfront: OpenClaw is overhyped, just like most AI agent tools right now. That doesn’t mean it’s bad – it’s actually quite interesting to work with – but expectations should be tempered. In practice, its usefulness scales almost entirely with how much access you’re willing to give it. The agent can do genuinely impressive things once it’s deeply integrated with your system and services.
More access also means more risk. Every permission you grant increases the potential blast radius if something goes wrong. On top of that, it’s vulnerable to prompt injection attacks. For example, if the agent is allowed to read emails or web content, a maliciously crafted message could manipulate its behavior in ways you didn’t intend. I strongly recommend reading the recent article by security firm Snyk on the topic.
YouTube API Blocks VPS IPs
One concrete problem I ran into was YouTube summarization. I wanted my OpenClaw agent to summarize YouTube videos automatically, when I ask it to. The obvious solution would be to pull the video transcript directly from YouTube’s API and then summarize it, which OpenClaw actually tried first.
The problem is that YouTube blocks API access from many VPS IP ranges. Since I intentionally host OpenClaw on a VPS for isolation and security, the agent simply couldn’t access the transcript API. That forced me to look for an alternative approach.
The get-tldr Skill
That’s when I found get-tldr.com, a service that offers an API for summarizing content from URLs, including YouTube videos. It handles transcript retrieval and summarization in a single request, neatly sidestepping the VPS IP restriction altogether. It works quite simply like this: message your OpenClaw bot get-tldr https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ and you’ll receive the summary shortly after.
The skill is deliberately minimal and deterministic. It doesn’t try to re-summarize or reinterpret the output from get-tldr. Instead, it focuses on formatting and presentation, which keeps behavior predictable and ensures the summary quality stays consistent with what the API provides.
I’ve uploaded the OpenClaw YouTube summary skill to ClawHub.ai, where you can install and use it with your own OpenClaw setup. If you’re dealing with similar API restrictions – or you just want a quick and reliable way to get YouTube summaries through an agent – it’s worth checking out.
Token Usage and Cost
A word of warning at the end: keep an eye on token usage. OpenClaw can burn through tokens very quickly. I tried to set up a cronjob which was a little buggy at that time – since I could not get it working as I wanted it to I kept to other things. When I came back a few hours later OpenClaw has burned through 5 dollars worth of gpt-5-mini tokens.
