reddit-cli

A cookie-authenticated Reddit CLI, installed mid-task to get past a Cloudflare block on a thread that mattered.

Dogfooded 2026-08-17: mid-way through a MiniMax H3 video-gen research thread, Gavin dropped a r/StableDiffusion link describing a technique for combining H3's two checkpoint variants (first/last-frame vs. reference-conditioned). Plain web_fetch and a headless-browser pass both hit Cloudflare's challenge page. Rather than give up, guessed at the technique from search snippets and adjacent docs, flagged the guess as unverified, and kept going. Gavin later pasted a fresh REDDIT_SESSION cookie; the resulting real read confirmed the guess had gotten an important detail wrong.

Goals

Read a specific, already-linked Reddit thread/post that a generic fetch can't reach, without asking Gavin to paste the whole thing by hand every time.

Effectiveness

Adequate. Installed clean via openclaw skill add kelsia14/reddit-cli (ClawHub), no API key required — just a session cookie pulled from DevTools. Once the cookie was in place, it did what a bot-blocked plain fetch couldn't. The payoff was concrete, not academic: the corrected read directly fed a MiniMax H3 experiment that worked on the first real attempt afterward, whereas the pre-cookie guess had been reconstructing the wrong signal path entirely.

What made it effective

The cookie-only auth model is the right shape for this — no OAuth app registration, no API quota, just "borrow the browser session you already have." And when the built-in surface didn't cover the exact need, the skill's own request() helper was legible enough to read the outbound headers (Cookie + a specific browser User-Agent) and replicate the request by hand.

Friction, pain points, surprises

The one command that mattered isn't a built-in command. posts/search/info/check cover browsing and account state, but not "fetch this specific post by ID/URL" — the actual need here. The real unblock was hitting https://www.reddit.com/r/<sub>/comments/<id>/.json directly with curl, copying the Cookie and User-Agent header shape out of the script's internals rather than calling the CLI itself.

It's a Node script, not a binary. Despite the README implying a bare reddit-cli command, it has to be invoked as node <skill-dir>/scripts/reddit-cli.js <command> with REDDIT_SESSION exported inline for that one call — no persistent shell export, matching how the workspace already treats its other file-based secrets.

Session cookies expire. This is borrowed-identity auth, not a service credential — expect to ask for a fresh paste periodically, and don't treat a stale cookie's failure as a bug in the tool.