How I Built a CLI Skill to Batch-Process YouTube Shorts

Last month, I had to process 16 YouTube Shorts. Trim intros. Normalize audio. Add watermarks. Export multiple formats. Generate thumbnails. Doing that manually in Premiere would have taken me most of an afternoon. So I built a CLI skill instead. It took about 2 hours to put together. On my machine, the batch itself finished in under 3 minutes once everything was set up. Here’s the exact structure I used. What I mean by a CLI skill For me, a CLI skill is a reusable shell workflow with: input validation sensible defaults predictable output error handling lightweight docs Instead of retyping a long FFmpeg command every time, I run one script and get the same result every time. # Instead of this: ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -ss 00:00:02 -to 00:00:35 -vf "scale=1080:1920" -af "loudnorm=I=-14" -c:v libx264 -preset fast output.mp4 # I run this: ./process-short.sh input.mp4 That difference sounds small, but it removes the part that always breaks in real work: remembering the flags, the order, and the