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Three‑bullet YouTube - a tiny n8n digest for AI videos

  • anshulkukreti
  • Sep 22
  • 2 min read

If you’ve read my other posts, you know I love tiny tools that make real‑life moments easier—simple, web‑based things you can just open and use. This one turns the AI‑video firehose into a short email I’ll actually read.

Short version: pull new videos from a few YouTube channels → summarize into exactly three bullets → Ship a clean email digest with links.


Why I built this

I follow a handful of AI/ML channels. They drop great stuff, but I don’t always have ~30 minutes per video. I wanted something that kept me in the loop without the doom‑scroll or the guilt.

So I built a small n8n flow that turns “too many videos” into “three bullets per video, in my inbox.”


What it is

A tiny, opinionated digest:

  • What’s new (the one line that matters)

  • Why it matters (impact in the real world)

  • Who should watch (role/use‑case)

Every video gets those three lines. No hype. No fluff.



How it works (under the hood)

  1. Schedule Trigger: It runs on a fixed cadence—no clicking required.

  2. Google Sheets → Channels: I keep a sheet of channel_ids I care about.

  3. RSS Read: For each channel, fetch https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=....

  4. 7‑day filter: Only pass along items where isoDate/pubDate is within the last week.

  5. LLM chain: Prompt the model to output exactly three crisp bullets per video.

  6. Formatter: Build a minimal HTML email (plus a plain‑text fallback) with titles, bullets, and links.

  7. Send: Email lands in my inbox with a subject like Top AI Video Updates - Date.

It’s small on purpose: easy to reason about, easy to swap parts later (e.g., Notion/Slack instead of email).

n8n Workflow
n8n Workflow

The summarization prompt I’m using

You are an assistant that summarizes YouTube content for a busy AI leader.
Given the video title, channel, publish date, and description (and transcript if available), produce EXACTLY 3 crisp bullets:
- 1st bullet: what’s new
- 2nd bullet: why it matters (impact)
- 3rd bullet: who should watch (role/use-case)
Keep each bullet under 20 words. Avoid hype.

Quick start (steal this)

  1. Make a Google Sheet with a column channel_id and drop in the channels you follow.

  2. In n8n, create a flow with: Schedule Trigger → Google Sheets (Get Rows) → RSS Read → IF (date filter) → LLM Chain → Code (format HTML) → Email.

  3. Hit Execute. Check your inbox.

Optional upgrades:

  • Pull transcripts for deeper summaries.

  • Add a “score” (views/comments) to rank the top 3 per run.

  • Push to Slack/Notion instead of email.


Why this helps

I’ve reduced “keep up with AI YouTube” to a 60‑second read. I can always click through if something looks important, but the default is clarity, not FOMO.

If you want a public version or a Slack‑first variant, tell me what you’d use it for. I’m listening.

 
 
 
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