After using Claude to create a gaming backlog manager and an interactive watchlist with my Instagram posts, I just had to give Claude the biggest challenge yet: cleaning up my 1,000+ video YouTube Watch Later playlist. I had created this massive playlist by religiously saving every video I thought I’d watch over almost nine years. You can probably guess that I have made little progress in terms of reducing my backlog during this time. The problem with YouTube’s Watch Later playlist is that it doesn’t allow deep filtering, sorting, or searching options to help me attack the backlog in a realistic manner. YouTube is one of my most-used apps, both on my phone and on the TV, so I always have new stuff to watch, meaning the Watch Later playlist is always growing. So, I had to take Claude’s help to turn this chaotic watchlist into one that gave me the power to slice and dice my 9-year-long saved videos collection.
My YouTube Watch Later was out of control
It was now or never
It goes the same way with nearly every backlog — you keep adding items to the list, but never get around to finishing them. Over nine years, I have added more than 1,000 videos to my Watch Later playlist, having every intention of watching every single one of them someday. For most of the videos, that day never arrived. Whenever I wanted something new to watch, my YouTube feed seemed way more interesting than my Watch Later playlist. The steadily growing backlog had become a chore I had to get through someday, “but not today.” This attitude was behind the playlist ballooning to 1,043 videos.
Finding the strength to manually go through the hundreds of videos and deciding the order in which to watch them seemed like a Herculean task. I had added most of the videos when I was in a different state of mind and during different phases of life. Many videos didn’t resonate with me now, but I still couldn’t bring myself to delete them from the list. The dreading feeling that I would never finish my backlog had started to creep in, which is when I decided to feed the playlist to Claude and let it do its magic. It had shown me the way when I wanted to reduce my game backlog and clean up my saved Instagram posts, so I had high hopes.
I fed the entire Watch Later playlist to Claude, hoping for the best
The CSV export wasn’t enough, though
A few days ago, I was able to export my Instagram saved posts using Meta’s export feature, so I decided to use Google Takeout to do the same with my YouTube data. The download link arrived in my email within seconds, and I was ready to finalize my prompt. I used ChatGPT to refine my rough prompt since I didn’t want to waste my limited tokens on Claude’s free tier. The refined prompt that ChatGPT gave me listed features I hadn’t even thought of adding, such as multi-select, bulk mark watched, random video recommendation, total backlog progress, and many more.
I tweaked the prompt slightly to ensure Claude gave me a persistent and offline web app I could use anywhere, but I hit a roadblock. Claude told me the exported CSV file only had the “video ID” and the “date added” fields — no thumbnails, duration, upload date, view count, or channel name. Claude suggested using a free YouTube Data API v3 key from my Google Cloud account, which would enable a one-time fetch on first launch, giving Claude all the info it needed to create the interactive watchlist I needed. So, I took five minutes to get the API key from Google Cloud and pasted it in the respective field after launching the web app. It took only a few seconds to populate all 1,043 videos from my Watch Later playlist, transforming my massive backlog into a comprehensive watchlist with a slick UI that I could play around endlessly.
YouTube let me save my favorite videos, but Claude made the watchlist usable
I feel like I’m finally in control
I love using YouTube, as you can probably surmise. The Watch Later feature has helped me save videos that I’ve wanted to watch, but just not in the moment. This progressive procrastination led to a backlog that became unmanageable, forcing me to use Claude to clean it up. The result was better than I had imagined. Claude gave me a modern-looking dashboard complete with thumbnails, view counts, duration, channel name, date added, and genre. The left pane had filters for “watched”, “unwatched,” “favorites,” genres, video length, and channel. I could search for any video in the top search box, change the layout to the standard Watch Later format, and even change the time I watch YouTube per day in the settings, so that the app could reflect it in the “est. days left” box on the banner.
One of the best features is the “What should I watch?” button that suggests a random video from the playlist when I can’t decide myself. However, the biggest game-changer is just the ability to filter the results based on the channel, duration, and genre, something YouTube doesn’t do natively. I can filter for shorts when I don’t have much time, or limit the results to videos under 5 minutes. The genre filters don’t work properly right now, and most of the videos are categorized as “Other,” but I intend to make some tweaks for that. This web app stores all my progress within the browser on whichever device I choose to start using it, and doesn’t have any external dependencies. Of course, as my YouTube Watch Later playlist grows, I have to fetch the data again, but that’s just a one-click process in the settings.
I’ve added all the Watch Later videos to a new playlist, so that I can edit the latter as I progress through the 1,043 videos I’ve added till now. The actual Watch Later playlist on my account will now be reserved for new videos that I need to save.
Claude is great for making sense of vast, unorganized data
I’ve not used Claude as much as my colleagues at XDA, but I’ve still derived incredible value from it. Even the free tier I’m on right now is fairly capable of fulfilling most queries, once you give Claude the proper prompt. My YouTube backlog is in a much better shape right now, and I’ve started making real progress. I’m also more comfortable removing those videos from the list that I know I’ll never watch.
