Big Idea

The argument in one line.

The real unlock for AI content creation is a Claude Code skill that researches, scripts, and renders a vertical avatar video on demand, compressing a full production session into one slash command.

Who This Is For

Read if. Skip if.

READ IF YOU ARE…

You are already using Claude Code daily and want a repeatable short-form content system you can run with one command.
You create content in a technical or build-in-public niche and want to scale posting volume without scaling time.
You've dismissed AI avatars as gimmicky but want to see the full pipeline wired together and running end-to-end.
You already have a HeyGen account or are evaluating it and want to see it integrated into an agentic workflow.

SKIP IF…

You are not yet using Claude Code — the HeyGen MCP integration won't make sense without that context.
You want human-filmed content only; the output of this system is an AI avatar video, not edited footage of a real person.

TL;DR

The full version, fast.

The tutorial builds a five-step Claude Code skill from scratch: Claude spawns 33 parallel research agents to map what makes yap-style videos go viral, saves the findings, then reuses them as a permanent source of truth. On each invocation the skill reads your ICP and brand-voice context, scrapes for trending topics, scores them on DM shareability and contrarian angle, writes a 30-second script in the verified format, and passes it to HeyGen via MCP to render a captioned vertical avatar video. The live test run produced a video in minutes and surfaced a strong contrarian script — AI as leverage, not replacement — which the host then riffed on as the real point of the whole exercise.

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Chapters

Where the time goes.

00:00 – 00:08

01 · Hook

Promise: film yap videos without filming yourself.

00:08 – 01:23

02 · Intro + setup

Host intro, create project folder, choose Opus 4.8, fire deep research prompt across all four questions.

01:23 – 02:15

03 · Build avatar in parallel

While research runs (10 min), start HeyGen avatar setup — the parallel-work insight.

02:15 – 03:09

04 · Avatar creation

Selfie → Google AI Studio image enhancement (Gemini 2 Flash) → convert to JPEG → upload look to HeyGen.

03:09 – 03:45

05 · Connect HeyGen MCP

Copy MCP URL from developers.haygen.com, add custom connector in Claude Code.

03:45 – 04:38

06 · Verify connection + research runs

Toggle HeyGen to always-allow; confirm 33 research agents spawned and running.

04:38 – 05:36

07 · Research results

26 sources reviewed, findings organized: hooks, virality mechanics, topic scoring, and script template.

05:36 – 06:51

08 · Build the skill

Prompt Claude to encode all research into a reusable slash-command skill for yap videos.

06:51 – 08:24

09 · Avatar + voice IDs

How to find avatar look ID and voice ID in HeyGen; clone your own voice; pass both IDs to Claude.

08:24 – 09:13

10 · Skill walkthrough

5-step pipeline Claude built: context → topic research → script → HeyGen render → return URL + log.

09:13 – 10:18

11 · Live test + commentary

First run produces a contrarian AI script; host riffs on the core insight — AI as leverage not replacement.

10:18 – 11:05

12 · Final output + CTA

Video delivered, community link for the pre-built skill, subscribe push.

Atomic Insights

Lines worth screenshotting.

Claude Code can spawn 33 parallel research agents in one prompt and synthesize 26 sources in about ten minutes while you build something else.
A Claude Code skill is a markdown instruction file your slash command reads on every run — build it once, get consistent results forever.
The five-step yap pipeline runs entirely autonomously: load context, research and score topic, write script, render via HeyGen MCP, return video URL.
HeyGen connects to Claude Code via a single MCP URL from developers.haygen.com — no API key wiring or custom code required.
Topics are scored on three axes before the script is written: DM shareability, contrarian angle, and the specific pain your ICP is feeling right now.
The proven yap script format: Hook (12 words, visceral) → Body (2-3 fast value beats) → Payoff (direct answer plainly stated) → Loop/CTA (a demand or question).
Setting avatar speech speed to 1.1x adds energy without sounding unnatural — the skill bakes this in automatically so you never forget.
Feeding Claude your own swipe file of viral hooks raises output quality more than any single prompt tweak.
Brand voice context (ICP doc, offer doc, hook file) read at invocation time means Claude writes in your voice without re-prompting every session.
AI avatar content still earns engagement when the perspective behind it is authentic — volume without a real point of view is what kills reach, not the avatar format itself.

Takeaway

Build once, run forever: the agentic content pipeline.

WHAT TO LEARN

The gap between creators who post consistently and those who burn out is usually a system problem, not a motivation problem — and Claude Code can be that system.

Deep research done once becomes a permanent foundation: saving Claude's synthesis means every future script benefits from 26 sources without spending another ten minutes or another batch of tokens.
Parallel work is the real speed unlock — starting the HeyGen avatar setup while research runs in background cuts total session time roughly in half.
A reusable skill encodes your research, brand voice, and format rules so you never re-explain the same constraints across sessions.
Scoring topics on shareability and contrarian angle before writing the script prevents the most common short-form failure: posting content that is technically correct but has no reason to travel.
The ICP doc and hook swipe file are inputs, not prompts — treating them as files Claude reads raises output quality more durably than any single clever prompt.
Speed (1.1x) and captions are production decisions baked into the skill, not afterthoughts — every output is optimized at render time without extra manual steps.
AI avatar content still earns engagement when the underlying perspective is real: volume without a distinct point of view is what kills reach, not the avatar format itself.

Glossary

Terms worth knowing.

Yap style video: A short-form vertical video — typically 30 seconds — where a single speaker delivers a fast, opinionated monologue directly to camera, engineered for saves and shares rather than likes.
Claude Code skill: A markdown instruction file stored in a project that Claude Code reads when a matching slash command is invoked, enabling repeatable multi-step agentic workflows from a single command.
MCP (Model Context Protocol): An open standard that lets Claude connect to external tools and APIs via a URL-based connector, enabling actions like creating HeyGen videos without writing custom integration code.
ICP (Ideal Customer Profile): A written description of the specific person you are trying to reach — their pain, goals, awareness level, and language — used here as context Claude reads before writing scripts.
Hook swipe file: A running collection of proven viral opening lines the creator has saved from other videos, used to train Claude toward hooks that already work in a given niche.
Avatar look ID / Voice ID: Two unique identifiers from HeyGen — one for the visual appearance, one for the cloned voice — that Claude passes to the HeyGen API to render a video as a specific digital twin.

Resources

Things they pointed at.

02:15productHeyGen ↗

03:09toolHeyGen MCP ↗

02:35toolGoogle AI Studio ↗

04:38toolFirecrawl ↗

Quotables

Lines you could clip.

09:43

“AI isn't your content, it's your leverage. Use it to amplify a real voice, not replace one.”

standalone contrarian thesis, no setup needed→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote

09:13

“Everyone's using AI to pump out more content. That's exactly why they're invisible.”

strong contrarian hook that works as a reel open→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote

10:18

“Stop asking AI to write for you, start asking what you'd say if you stopped copying everyone.”

tight CTA-adjacent line, stands alone→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote

The Script

Word for word.

Read-along

Don't just watch it. Burn it in.

See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.

00:00Yap style videos are hitting millions of views on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. But what if you didn't have to film them yourself? In this video, we're going to use Claude code to generate Yap style videos for you using your AI clone.

00:14It's gonna research your topic, write the script, and create your AI avatar using Hagen. And if we haven't met yet, my name is Duncan Rogoff. I'm a former art director for brands like Apple, PlayStation, and Nissan, and I now run one of the top communities for learning Cloud Code and building income.

00:29If you wanna follow along, we're gonna build everything step by step. So focus in, close all your open tabs, and let's build. If you wanna get access to the skill we built today, just check the link in the description.

00:38So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna come into the Claude desktop app and make sure we're inside of Claude code. Next, all you need to do is create a brand new folder for us to work in. So I'll just put one on my desktop and I'll just call this yap because it doesn't really matter, and we will open this up.

00:54I'm also going to use the model Opus 4.8 for this because it's a more complex task that requires a little bit more power, but you might be able to get away with Sonnet. But let's stick with Opus. So the first thing we need to do is to figure out like what actually makes a good yap style video, and so we will just have Claude do the research for us.

01:11I need to figure out what makes a good yap style short form video for Instagram reels. I need to figure out what format the script should take, what hooks are popular, what kind of topics or content resonate, and really what goes viral.

01:24Please do some deep research for me. So today, we're just going to be building this skill from the ground up. And the beauty of working with a system like QuadCode is there's no use waiting around while we could be doing some other things.

01:35So what we can do is we can already start building out our AI avatar while Quad does our research. And so in order to do this, we wanna come over to a site called HeyGen. And while they are the sponsor of this video, they are the industry standard for AI avatars or digital clones.

01:48The product is super easy to use, the results are insane, and they connect super easily with Quad Code. So once you create your account, all you need to do is come into Avatar. So I already have an Avatar that I've been working from, but if you wanna start from scratch, just come up to the top here and click new Avatar.

02:03You can create a virtual character just by uploading an image or designing with AI, or you can clone a real person by recording your webcam or uploading a video clip you have. So first thing I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna take a selfie. So I just took this photo of myself and it's good enough for today.

02:18But if you wanted to make it better, you could really quickly come into something like Google AI Studio. You could upload the photo of yourself. Make sure you're using Nano Banana two, and you could say something like, please make this look like I'm a professional in a YouTube studio.

02:32And then I'm just gonna go ahead and change the aspect ratio to nine by 16, which is vertical, which is perfect for shorts. And the resolution, let's set this up high to make sure we have good quality images. So this is the image that we created.

02:42I think it's just okay honestly, but with a little bit more work on the prompting, I think you could get what you wanted. I'm gonna use the original image because I actually kinda liked it. So I'm gonna come back into my avatar here, go ahead and click in and I'm just going to upload a look.

02:55PageN actually prefers a JPEG or a PNG, so I'm just gonna open this up in preview, come over here, file, go to export, save this as a JPEG in my downloads folder, the name doesn't really matter, click upload, upload my photo now, and we have this all ready to go.

03:12I'm just gonna go ahead and click create look. And to make sure that we are all ready to go, what we wanna do is you wanna connect the Hagen MCP up to Claude Code.

03:20So you can just come over to developers dot haygen dot com, click into the MCP tab, and what you wanna do is you just want to copy this link right here. So I'm gonna click copy, come back into Claude Code while this is doing the research for us, Click the plus down at the bottom here.

03:36You can go into connectors and manage connectors. And then at the top, click the plus one more time, add a custom connector, and I'm just gonna name this HeyGen. Paste in the URL here and click add.

03:48You can see this is all ready to go and it just says you're not connected to HeyGen yet. All you have to do is click connect when you're logged into your account. It's gonna just ask you to give QuadCode access to HeyGen.

03:59I'm gonna click yes. Go ahead and now Claude code is all connected to HeyGen and we are ready to use Claude to create our digital twin. So you can see that we have HeyGen over here.

04:09So these are all the permissions that HeyGen has access to and I'm just gonna switch these to always allow so I don't need to approve everything every time. And I'm just gonna do the same down here and we are all good to go. And so the last thing to check to make sure that you're good is you just click the plus.

04:23If you come into connectors and you can see that we have HeyGen right here toggled on, that means we're all connected. And so this is why Cloud Code is so powerful. You can see right here that deep research is going and it's actually spawned 33 different agents for us to research Yap style videos.

04:39So we can open this up and we can see all of the different agents that are running, all of the searches that is performing. You can also see the token usage and how long things are taking. So this just finished.

04:48It took about ten minutes and it did a lot of research for us. It went through 26 sources and organized everything for me around the four questions that I asked. Here's what I discovered about writing viral hooks.

04:59Here's how it thinks we should pick topics to create content that resonates. So engineer for the action you want, not for like. So engineer something for savable content or shareable content or story time or like a rant.

05:11Right? Here's some of the virality mechanics, and here's actually a template that we can use to base everything on.

05:17So this is a very good start. So what do we need to do from here? Well, first, I wanna save this research.

05:22We did a lot of work. We spent a bunch of tokens. We might as well save it.

05:24So if we ever need it for anything else, we have it. The first thing I wanna do is I want you to just save this research in our folder so that I have it for later. While it's doing that, the next thing we wanna do is you want to start thinking about creating the skill.

05:36A skill is basically just a reusable set of instructions that quad code can follow to get consistent results every single time. So if we're gonna be creating a lot of these Yap style videos, we wanna make sure we can do it from a single command. And what's cool is we already have all the pieces that we need.

05:51We understand what makes a strong hook. We understand the format that works for a Yap style video. We understand the script, and we have our hey Gen avatar all ready to go.

06:00So this is cool. I just went ahead and saved this research for us. If we ever need to reference it later, we have it.

06:05So let's ask it to build the skill for us. Based off of all of this research, we need to create a skill for Yap style videos. Basically, the skill needs to research some topics that are trending in my niche right now.

06:16It needs to draft a yap style script including a viral hook and the proven format that works. This needs to be engineered for engagement and virality, and then it actually needs to use Hegen to create an avatar speaking that script. Here's my Hegen avatar ID and the voice ID.

06:34So there are two pieces to your Hegen avatar. One is the video and one is the voice. So the video ID you can get inside of your avatar, you can just click these dots, you can say copy avatar look ID.

06:46I'll come back into Cloud Code and I'll just say, HeyGen avatar ID, and I will paste that in.

06:53And then I will say, hey, Jen, voice ID. And you can come into here, and if you see on the left, we have voices, and you can choose from this whole list of voices. These are voices that I've generated.

07:02You have the hey, Jen library, which literally has hundreds of voices for you to choose from. You can just listen to a couple of these and pick the one that you want. If you wanna clone your own voice, so it sounds like you, just click clone your voice at the top.

07:13You can actually record audio here directly into HeyGen, or if you have an audio file ready to go, maybe a clip that you've already processed to sound extra good, you can just upload that file here. I already have my own voice that I've cloned. It's this professional one here.

07:25I literally fed it two hours of me talking. You can come in here, click get voice ID, come back into Claude, and I'm just gonna paste that in as well. So this is why we connected to HeyGen earlier to make sure that Claude code had access to the API to understand how to actually make our avatar do things.

07:41It says it has everything it needs. It's building the app skill for us as we speak. So this really only took a couple of minutes and it built a whole skill for us.

07:49So the first thing it's going to do, it's going to read information about my ICP, my offer, and my brand voice. This system actually knew to do this. I didn't instruct it.

07:57It's okay if you don't have this stuff. Claude will figure it out. So it's gonna read from the hook swipe file that I have because I've been saving viral hooks over these past couple of weeks so we can create higher quality content.

08:07So you could do something similar. Go to Instagram, find hooks that are working, write them down somewhere, and give it to Claude. The next thing it's going to do is going to research any topics.

08:15It's going to scrape the web across my niche to figure out what people are talking about. It's going to pick one single topic scored on DM shareability, a contrarian angle, and the pain my ICP is feeling.

08:26If I name a specific topic directly, it's going to not do any research. It's just gonna use that topic. So if something is trending like Anthropic just shut down Fable, I can just tell it to make a video about that.

08:36Next, it's going to draft the script for us. It's going to apply the verified format from the research so we know this works, and then it's going to render the avatar via Hegen. It's going to use my avatar and voice IDs that I gave it.

08:49It's gonna be nine by 16, so vertical format, great for shorts. And it's actually even going to burn in the captions for us. It's going to set the speed to 1.1 so we talk a little bit faster, so it has a little bit more energy.

09:01And then once it's done, it's going to return the video URL and it's gonna log everything for us. It's just asking, do I wanna do a live test run now? Of course.

09:08So I will just say yes. So the system already did some research for me script, and I actually think this is kind of funny and worth talking about.

09:16So basically, is a strong convergence. All the reels are saying right now, if your 2026 strategy is AI doing all the heavy lifting, it won't work. AI makes average branding easier, but exceptional branding harder.

09:27And I actually do think there is some truth to this. I do think in a world of AI swap and where people are increasingly putting out AI content on the Internet, there is increasingly more room for people with an authentic presence and voice to stand out. That being said, I've been creating a lot of AI content content myself, and people are still engaging with it.

09:44They're still sharing. They're still liking. They're still commenting.

09:47They're still receiving lead magnets. So it really all depends on who your audience is and the value of the content that you're creating. So this is the script that it wrote.

09:54Everyone's using AI to pump out more content. That's exactly why they're invisible. Here's what nobody's saying.

10:00So that's a really strong opening hook. And I think this is the core line right here. AI isn't your content, it's your leverage.

10:06Use it to amplify a real voice, not replace one. So if we come back up here, I think that's why some of these things like training Quad with your brand voice or your personal story or your own philosophy or your beliefs is actually really impactful. Because now you don't just have an AI avatar that sounds and thinks like everyone else, you have one that's actually true to you and based off of your personal experience and beliefs.

10:27So stop asking AI to write for you, start asking what you'd say if you stopped copying everyone. So it sent the script over to Heygen. Heygen is processing the video and we're just waiting to hear back.

10:37So here's the video the system created. If you wanna start using Heygen today, just check the link in the description. If you wanna get access to the skill already built for you, join the community.

10:45Everyone's using AI to pump out more content. That's exactly why they're invisible. Here's what nobody's saying.

10:50The feed is drowning in AI spam, so the algorithm stopped rewarding volume and started rewarding the one thing AI can't fake. You, your real opinion, the story only you have lived. When you use AI to post more, you blend in.

11:02When you use it to say something true faster, you stand out.

The Hook

The bait, then the rug-pull.

The hook is a blunt one-two: name the format that is winning right now, then pull the rug on the assumption that you have to be in front of a camera to make it. Eight seconds to make you lean forward.

Frameworks