Using Hermes Agent to turn long YouTube courses into a searchable library
was used as the coordinator for turning a large Inner Circle Trader YouTube back catalog into a searchable personal library. The target set was 679 videos across more than 30 playlists, covering mentorship material from 2016 through 2026. The goal was not just to save videos in a playlist, but to create timestamped transcripts so any concept could be searched across the whole collection.
The setup used a trading profile named Robin, , , yt-dlp, a local markdown wiki, and cron jobs for overnight batch runs. So far, the library contains 335 transcript files, covering 428 hours of content and 368 of the 679 channel videos. Major playlists were included, such as the 2025/2026 lecture series and the 2022, 2023, and 2024 mentorship materials.
The main problem was rate limits. could process about 50 videos in 2 minutes, then become blocked for hours, while yt-dlp hit its own limit after 10 to 15 downloads. Each tool had a different cooldown period, which made it hard to know which part of the pipeline could run again at any moment.
Key points
- A dedicated profile named Robin managed the workflow.
- The project produced 335 transcript files from 368 YouTube videos.
- The searchable library covered 428 hours of trading education content.
- and yt-dlp both hit separate rate limits during large batch runs.
- Cron jobs were used to keep the process running overnight in batches.