HackerTube Launches: YouTube Clone Built by Claude Opus Using HN Data
A developer used Claude Opus 5.5 and Sonnet to rapidly build HackerTube, a YouTube alternative frontend curated from Hacker News comments. The tool employs an automated workflow to clean nearly two decades of recommendation data, filtering 40k comments down to 6,454 high-quality videos to counter algorithmic slop. This project demonstrates the efficiency of AI agents in executing end-to-end tasks including data cleaning, application building, and deployment.
Full Report
31 Oct, 2026
It was Friday night at 11pm, I was tired, I went to YouTube to watch something and realized that I was looking at an enshittified wall of slop. Insanely exaggerated thumbnails, dumb recommendations of the same tired topics, truly terrible idiocracy-grade content. I'm sure this algorithm works well for the median person on the internet, but it definitely does not work for me. So this morning (Saturday) I took a hold of my Opus 5.5 and gave it the task: Let's write our own YouTube clone based on whatever videos have been recommended on Hacker News. And Opus came back with: hackertube.org!
Opus downloaded all comments of HackerNews, filtered them down, ran Sonnet over them in a workflow, got rid of spam and low grade content, and narrowed them down to just 40K comments recommending a YouTube video. In total, we get 6,454 YouTube videos that have been recommended by a few people on HN from 2007-2026 across 150 topics. Then we wrap it up in a YouTube UI, get a domain, push to a VPS, secure, harden, optimize and voila!
HackerTube:
- Contains quality content
- Uses the 50% thumbnail instead of the uploaded thumbnail
- Custom and good ForYou recommendations without any user accounts, storing state in local browser session
- Keyboard shortcuts
- Export of the site's data available to give to your agent to easily create your own version
This takes ~2 hours now. I can breathe again. Thank you Opus 5.5 <3.
作者发帖说明（HN）：
YouTube-style UI over 6,454 videos sourced from 39,834 HN comments since 2007.