Spy

A Claude Code Skill by @tenfoldmarc

Give it your competitors' Instagram handles and it tells you exactly what's working — which hooks went viral, why they worked, and gives you ready-to-use templates you can steal for your own content. No setup, no database, instant results.

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What It Does

1. Scrapes your competitors' last 50 Instagram posts each
2. Finds outliers — posts that got 5x+ their normal views (the ones that actually went viral)
3. Downloads and transcribes each viral reel to extract the spoken hook
4. Screenshots the first frame to capture the on-screen text hook
5. Templatizes every hook into a reusable [BRACKET] framework you can adapt to any topic
6. Ranks all templates by total views and tells you which ones work for reels AND carousels
7. Explains why each hook works psychologically — so you understand the mechanism, not just the words

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Requirements

• A Mac, Linux, or Windows computer
• Claude Code installed and working
• An Apify account (free tier works) for Instagram scraping
• yt-dlp for downloading reels
• whisper for transcription
• ffmpeg for screenshots

Don't worry about connecting these manually — the skill walks you through everything on first run.

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Install

Step 1 — Open your terminal

Mac: Press Command + Space, type Terminal, hit Enter. Windows: Press Win + R, type cmd, hit Enter. (If you have Git Bash, use that instead.) Linux: Open your terminal app.

Step 2 — Run this command

Copy-paste this entire line and hit Enter:

git clone https://github.com/tenfoldmarc/spy-skill ~/.claude/skills/spy

Wait for it to finish (takes a few seconds).

Step 3 — Open Claude Code

In the same terminal window, type:

claude

Hit Enter.

Step 4 — Run the skill

Type:

/spy @competitor1 @competitor2 @competitor3

Replace with real Instagram handles. On your first run, the skill checks for required tools and walks you through installing anything that's missing.

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Usage

Basic — spy on 3 competitors:

/spy @hormozi @garyvee @danmartell

From URLs:

/spy https://www.instagram.com/hormozi/ https://www.instagram.com/garyvee/

Any niche works — AI, fitness, marketing, ecommerce, cooking, whatever:

/spy @drjasonfung @hubaborhealth @glucose_goddess

The skill auto-detects the niche from the content it finds.

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What You Get

For every viral outlier, you get three hooks + three templates:

• Spoken hook — what they actually said in the first 3 seconds
• On-screen text hook — what text was displayed on the video
• Caption hook — what they wrote in the post caption
• Templates — each hook abstracted into a [BRACKET] framework you can fill in with your own topic

Plus a Template Leaderboard showing which patterns are working across multiple creators, ranked by total views.

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Updating

To get the latest version:

cd ~/.claude/skills/spy && git pull

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Want More?

/spy is a one-shot analysis. If you want a living database that auto-refreshes every week and builds a growing library of proven hooks, check out /hook-intel.

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Built By

@tenfoldmarc — Follow for daily AI automation walkthroughs. Real systems, not theory.