I automated my YouTube workflow with Node.js. The hard part wasn't the code.

I wanted to stop spending weekends editing videos, so I built a pipeline that takes a YouTube URL and outputs a fully produced video ready to upload — script, voiceover, AI clips, subtitles, thumbnail, the whole thing. About 200 lines of Node.js orchestrating a bunch of AI APIs. It mostly works. But the part that broke the most often wasn't ffmpeg or the subtitle timing or the YouTube upload auth. It was figuring out what to actually make. The general shape: fetch transcript → Claude analyzes and writes a new script → Minimax TTS for voiceover → Veo generates video clips → ffmpeg assembles everything → uploads to YouTube. The messiest part was handling five different AI APIs in one script. Each has its own SDK, its own auth pattern, its own response format. I kept having to look up whether the response was at data.choices[0].message.content or data.content[0].text or somewhere else entirely. I ended up switching to SkillBoss, which is a gateway that puts all of them behind one endpoint