How to make YouTube Shorts with Claude Code, and schedule them
What you need
- Claude Code, in your terminal or the Code tab of the Claude desktop app.
- Node 20 or newer, and Chrome or Edge, which the frames are drawn in.
- A free Runsheet account with your YouTube channel connected.
Set it up once
- In Runsheet, open Settings, API keys and make a key with Read, Write, Write copy and Upload from this machine ticked. It is shown once, so copy it.
- In Claude Code run
/plugin marketplace add KalpeshMahida0212/runsheet-mcp, then/plugin install runsheet@runsheet, and paste the key when it asks. - Ask:
Fill next week’s Shorts.Before the first video, Claude checks your computer and installs only what is missing: the engine, ffmpeg, the browser driver and the voice, about 90 MB.
What happens when you ask
Claude reads what worked on your channel, writes each Short as scenes, and makes it on your computer: a voice, captions lit word by word, music made for the video and a sound for every move. It checks the frames, then uploads each one private with its publish time, one a day into your open days. Any video can be pulled before it goes live.
Pick a style
- Studio. Cream, ink or accent grounds, white cards, headlines that rise word by word, caption pills.
- Kinetic. No captions: huge type stretched to the frame, slamming in word by word, wipes and hard hits.
- Neon. Dark and electric: a synthwave grid, glass panels, glowing type typed in, glitch cuts.
- Pop. Bright and playful: sticker cards with thick outlines, bouncy type, doodles and marker highlights.
- Editorial. A calm magazine page: big serif type set line by line, hairlines, numerals and whitespace.
Name one when you ask (“Make this week’s Shorts in Neon”), or set it once in the settings file, ~/.runsheet-shorts.json, which also holds how many Shorts a week, the time of day each goes public and your time zone.
Shorts from your long videos
Give it a long video on your computer, or a folder of them. It hears every word on your own machine, reads the whole transcript, picks the moments that stand on their own and frames each one for a phone with captions that follow what you say. The speech part is a one time install of about 470 MB, plus its model on the first listen.
What it costs
The Free plan makes one video, in Studio. Paid plans make 15 a month on Starter, 60 a month on Creator and 250 a month on Network, in all 5 styles. See Claude make the videos, or compare the plans.
Published 8 November 2026. Written by Kalpesh Mahida, who builds Runsheet.