claude-defuddle

A Claude Code skill that extracts clean markdown notes from web pages, YouTube videos, Apple Podcasts, and academic papers, then saves them into an Obsidian vault with proper frontmatter.

Why it exists: Claude Code's built-in WebFetch dumps raw HTML into the context window, which wastes tokens and often includes junk. Defuddle strips and processes content externally — via the defuddle CLI for articles, yt-dlp for YouTube transcripts, and PDF converters for papers — so Claude never sees the raw page. Summarization is offloaded to a separate LLM call (Gemini, OpenAI, or Ollama), keeping Claude's context clean.

What it handles:

• Web pages — strips ads and clutter, generates summaries and heading indexes, produces Obsidian-formatted notes
• YouTube — pulls full transcripts with timestamps, extracts or generates chapter markers, adds summaries
• Apple Podcasts — transcript extraction with timestamps and auto-generated chapters (macOS only)
• Academic papers — accepts DOI and arXiv URLs, fetches PDFs from open access or Datalab API, extracts abstracts and keywords
• Images — optionally downloads and compresses referenced images locally with pngquant/jpegoptim

Usage: paste a URL in a Claude Code conversation. The skill intercepts it, processes externally, and offers to save the result to your vault.

Setup: install as a Claude Code skill in ~/.claude/skills/defuddle/. Requires defuddle CLI (npm install -g defuddle), yt-dlp, Python 3.8+. Configure vault path and AI provider (Gemini free tier works) in the script.

Relevance to this wiki: this solves a similar problem to the inbox workflow here — capturing web content into an Obsidian vault. The token-efficiency approach (process outside Claude's context, only show clean markdown) is worth considering if the wiki's ingest workflow hits context limits on large pages.

Repo: https://github.com/spaceage64/claude-defuddle — 23 stars, MIT license.