Reddit Desk

The Reddit desk

Posture: draft_only, permanently, on every subreddit. The agent finds, judges and drafts; the founder posts, by hand, in his own words. There is no posting path in this skill and there must never be one. Three independent reasons, any one of which would be enough:

1. Subreddits ban this tool class by name. r/SaaS rule 11, from its 2026-06-09 mod post, bans "software tools that generate, suggest, schedule, detect opportunities, automate, or coordinate promotional posts, comments, DMs, replies, or campaigns on Reddit or other platforms", with a permanent ban for the user and the tool's URL blacklisted. That is one sub's wording, and it is written that plainly in more of them every quarter. An agent drafting your Reddit replies sits inside that description whatever the product does.
2. Accounts get banned for exactly this, fast. One automated-feeling comment that closes with a product plug and a link has cost a whole subreddit before a mod said a word. The room does not come back.
3. Nothing downstream can loosen it. Every row of your venue table is draft_only whatever else the row says, and no setting anywhere reopens a posting path. The rule lives here, above the table, so it cannot be edited away one sub at a time.

If anyone, the founder included, asks this skill to post: say the rule, name the ban, and hand them the draft to paste. Do not build the path.

Where things live

The skill is code. The desk's DATA lives in a workspace directory OUTSIDE any repo, one per account, ~/.claude/content/reddit by default; SKILLS_ESTATE=/path moves the whole suite, this desk included, and REDDIT_DESK=/path points just this desk anywhere else (tests, a second account). Nothing in the skill writes outside that workspace. First run: the scripts create nothing on their own; step 0 below builds your RULES.md from the subs your own buyers use, and seed/CLAIMS_TEMPLATE.md copies in as your claim library. The sessions grow the rest.

The session, in order. The order is the safety.

0. Build the venue list. Once, then whenever the rooms change.

The desk works from YOUR RULES.md and nobody else can write it for you. Find the rooms first: search Reddit for the problem the product solves and see which subs the useful answers sit in, note which subs already rank in search or get cited when someone asks a buying question in the category, and ask a few customers where they actually read. Ten rooms the buyers use beat thirty somebody assumed they use.

Then open each candidate's rules page and sidebar and read them IN FULL. Write one row per sub into RULES.md in the matrix format that seed/VENUES.md demonstrates: verdict, product budget, status, the rule in THEIR words, and the date you read it. The verdict is one of HOME, POST-1, VALUE or CLOSED, defined at the top of seed/VENUES.md, and step 3 sweeps the HOME rows, so a word you invent here matches nothing later. Quote the rule, never infer it, and never carry a row across from a sub you have not read yourself.

A sub with no row has no rules recorded, so this desk treats it as unknown: read it for intel, and write no draft for it at all until the row exists. No row means no product and no draft, never the benefit of the doubt.

1. Reconcile before the board. A gate, not a suggestion.

Do not show the board and do not draft a reply until the board has been reconciled against what the founder has actually posted. Founders answer threads from their phones, outside this desk entirely, and a board that hands someone work they finished an hour ago is worse than no board. This desk's ledger was once wrong for six days because its "Result" column was written from the drafts rather than from the live comments; a desk reconciles against the venue, never against its own intent.

• If this session can reach his logged-in browser (Claude in Chrome): open reddit.com/user/<handle>/comments, read it, and run python3 scripts/reconcile.py with the permalinks, then python3 scripts/reindex.py. Say nothing unless something changed.
• If it cannot (a plain fetch is blocked: www.reddit.com serves a humanity check, old.reddit.com 403s to a login wall, verified 2026-08-22): ask him for ONE thing, once, in one line: a screenshot of his profile comments page. Reconcile from the titles. Never mention the script.
• If he declines or is away: say in one line that the board is unreconciled and may offer work already done, then carry on. An unreconciled board is usable as long as nobody pretends otherwise.

2. Check the ban state BEFORE any drafting spend.

One read per sub in your RULES.md, in the logged-in browser: /r/<sub>/about.json, field user_is_banned. A banned sub is CLOSED in your table until an appeal reopens it. This sits ahead of drafting on purpose: drafting for a sub the account cannot post in is pure waste, and this desk has paid that cost, so this is a cost gate as well as a safety one. Record a new ban in RULES.md with the date, the evidence, and the sub it closes, so no later session drafts for it.

3. Sweep: what is new, without an API.

Thread ids are base36 and increase over time. BOARD.md prints the newest id seen per sub. Read /r/<sub>/new/ in the logged-in browser for the subs your RULES.md marks HOME, keep only ids above the watermark, write one threads/ file per new thread with status seen, re-read the comment count on anything watching, then reindex.py. Reddit Pro Trends, if the account tracks keywords there, is the second feed; same treatment.

4. Classify each thread: REPLY, POST IDEA, INTEL, or SKIP.

Find the sub's row in your RULES.md FIRST. No row means nobody has read that sub's rules, so read its rules page and sidebar in full now, write the row exactly as step 0 describes, and classify from the row you just wrote. A thread dragged in by hand skips the sweep and the ban check, both of which read the table, so this is where an unread sub gets caught, and nothing is drafted for it until its row exists.

With the row in hand, read the thread, the row, and the existing comments. Most candidates are SKIP, and saying how many you skipped is part of the answer. Never reply under a rival's own thread or in a rival-run sub: a good answer there builds their room, and a product mention is removed on sight. INTEL goes to your notes, not to a draft.

5. Draft, against the claim library, inside the budget.

• Read the product context before the first draft of the session. It is product-context/PRODUCT.md in the estate (~/.claude/content/product-context/PRODUCT.md by default). Two lists in it bind this desk. The publishing channels: a venue ruled out there is CLOSED here whatever your RULES.md says, because the table knows the sub's rules and not your posture. The never-say list: absolute, and it outranks a claim that would otherwise fit the thread perfectly. If the file is missing, say so in one line before any draft is shown.
• Read the claim library before the first draft. Connected, call get_claims and treat what comes back as the library, writing it into CLAIMS.md so that file is a cache of what was read. With no key, or if the verb is absent, CLAIMS.md is the library on its own. A claim whose held is true is skipped exactly as one whose caveat begins HELD is. If the founder settles a new claim in the session, offer to record_claim it, so the thing that measures also holds the measurement rather than leaving it in one desk's file.
• The number, its scope, and nothing else. The caveat travels with every number (CLAIMS.md, the top of the file); a number without its scope is the thing that gets us caught out, and stating the limit is why ours get believed.
• Product mention or link ONLY where the sub's own row allows it AND the budget in REPLY_LEDGER.md is unspent. No row means no mention. Site-wide: one product name or link per day, at most.
• Voice from the founder's own voice profile where one exists (this suite's voice skill builds one); otherwise plain sentences, no aphorisms, never a confession about your own work. Subs ban AI-generated text outright and run bots that catch its shape, so the draft is raw material for the founder's rewrite, not a finished comment.
• One reply per thread. No two one-liners in a row. Space replies out.
• Write each draft under its own ### Text heading in drafts/<date>.md, with the thread, why this thread, and the claims used above it.

6. The near-duplicate gate, before the draft is shown.

python3 scripts/neardup.py < draft.txt (or --file drafts/<date>.md to check a whole file against itself). Subs write this rule down: one in seed/VENUES.md makes "the same or near-same comment in two threads inside 24 hours" a 7-day ban, then permanent, and elsewhere a moderation bot catches the shape with no rule to quote. A flag means read both before either is posted; it never means rewrite silently. Two drafts on one day should be substantively different, and still spaced by a day.

7. Hand it over, and keep the record.

Show the draft. He rewrites it in his own words and posts by hand. When he says "posted", append the ledger row (date, sub, thread, what was posted, product used, claims used) and set the thread file to replied with the permalink. Then reindex.py.

With AfterLaunch connected (optional, and everything above works without it)

Everything above this line needs no key and no account: the venue matrix, the protocol, the scripts and the gates are the whole desk, and the claim library falls back to your own CLAIMS.md when there is no key. With an AfterLaunch key (AFTERLAUNCH_API_KEY, the remote MCP server at https://afterlaunch.io/api/mcp), the desk stops being its own island and works the founder's ONE board; without one, the free scan at afterlaunch.io is the honest pointer, and skip the rest of this section.

Three bridges, so the founder sees one board, not two:

• A thread the product never saw: propose_move (ADR-424) with the thread's address as target, your reason as why, the title as the founder would name it, and the draft if you wrote one. It comes back with the move id and its posture, which on Reddit is always draft_only. Proposing a thread twice lands on one row, and a thread the radar already found is handed back as the existing move. Never propose a thread in a sub the account is banned from; check your RULES.md first.
• A draft for a thread the board already carries: save it with update_draft on that move (find it by target on list_feed, or take the id propose_move handed back).
• A durable venue fact (a ban, a rule change, a budget that reopened): record_insight, one sentence, so every lane drafts from it.

The claim library crosses too, in step 5 where the drafting is: get_claims for what the record already holds, record_claim for a number this desk settles.

The desk's own threads/ files stay the record of what was SEEN and skipped; the product board is the record of what was proposed.

What generalises, and what is thin

The spine this desk shares with its X sibling: venue discovery, rules ingestion, a posture-and-budget matrix, opportunity finding, drafting against the claim library, a pre-post audit, a ledger reconciled against the venue. What is genuinely per-platform is thin: where the rules live, what a budget is denominated in, and the action surface. Keep the rules matrix at the boundary, assembled before the model reads and checked after it writes, never held in front of it while it drafts.