Agent Reach is an open-source CLI that gives your programming agent read access to Twitter/X, Reddit, YouTube, GitHub, Bilibili, and a dozen-plus more platforms, without a single paid API. Install an Agent Skill in ~/.claude/skills/ and your agent takes care of the rest. MIT license, 79,200 stars, and in six months, from first commit to #211 among GitHub’s most-starred repositories.
What problem does Agent Reach solve?
Your agent can already read a web page if you pass it the URL. What it can’t do is search Reddit for the three threads where someone ran into your exact error, pull the transcript from a 40-minute talk, or read a Twitter thread that a library author posted instead of writing documentation. Those platforms are behind an API that now costs money, or behind a login wall.
The usual workarounds are one-off: a yt-dlp invocation you remember off the top of your head, a Jina Reader URL you paste by hand, a scraper you wrote once and never maintained. Agent Reach’s contribution isn’t any of those tools separately: it’s that it installs them, configures them, and then hands your agent a skill that documents which one to use for each platform.
The second half matters more than it seems. Each platform has a primary backend and, where one exists, a fallback. When Bilibili blocks yt-dlp, routing switches to bili-cli without you noticing. Platforms break scrapers constantly; the value here is that someone else is maintaining that routing table.
Which platforms work without any setup?
Six work as soon as you install it:
| Platform | Backend | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Web pages | Jina Reader | No setup |
| YouTube | yt-dlp | No setup (subtitles and metadata) |
| GitHub | gh CLI |
No setup, public repos |
| RSS/Atom | feedparser | No setup |
| Bilibili | bili-cli → OpenCLI | No setup for search |
| V2EX | — | No setup |
And these need credentials:
| Platform | Backend | What it needs |
|---|---|---|
| Twitter/X | twitter-cli → OpenCLI | Cookies |
| OpenCLI → rdt-cli | Login | |
| OpenCLI → Graph API | Desktop only | |
| OpenCLI | Desktop only | |
| XiaoHongShu | OpenCLI → xiaohongshu-mcp | Browser session |
Exa handles semantic web search and sets up automatically. There’s also a transcribe subcommand for audio and video, though that relies on Groq or OpenAI and needs a provider key: it’s the only part of the tool that isn’t free.
For most developers, the half that doesn’t need setup is already the interesting half. YouTube transcripts and GitHub search alone change what you can ask an agent to do.
How do you download YouTube subtitles from the terminal?
With Agent Reach installed, you don’t need any command of your own: you ask your agent for the video you want and the skill routes the request to yt-dlp, which is YouTube’s backend and works with no setup or account. The subtitles and metadata arrive in your agent’s context directly.
This solves a very specific and very common case: documentation that only exists as a conference talk. Instead of watching 40 minutes of video hunting for the snippet you care about, your agent reads the full transcript and answers the question you asked. If what you want is to summarize a YouTube video instead of searching for something specific, it works the same way: the subtitles go into the context and the summary is done by the model you’re already using, without passing through an external tool.
How do you install Agent Reach?
Two commands with pipx:
pipx install https://github.com/Panniantong/agent-reach/archive/main.zip
agent-reach install --env=auto
That second command is verification-only by design: it checks your environment and reports what’s available without touching anything. To actually install the backends:
agent-reach install --env=auto --system
Add --dry-run first if you want to see the full list of operations before any of them run. If you only want specific platforms, pass them explicitly:
agent-reach install --env=auto --system --channels=opencli,twitter
On Homebrew Python, or on any externally-managed environment, use a venv instead of pipx:
python3 -m venv ~/.agent-reach-venv
source ~/.agent-reach-venv/bin/activate
pip install https://github.com/Panniantong/agent-reach/archive/main.zip
agent-reach install --env=auto --system
After that, check what you ended up with:
agent-reach doctor
doctor reports the status of each platform and what’s still left to configure. It accepts --json if you want to automate something on top of it.
How do you install these skills in Claude Code, OpenCode, and OpenClaw?
Through a skill, installed separately from everything else:
agent-reach skill --install
This writes an agent-reach skill in every agent directory it finds: ~/.claude/skills/agent-reach, ~/.openclaw/skills/agent-reach, ~/.config/opencode/skills/agent-reach, and ~/.agents/skills/agent-reach. If you use OpenClaw alongside Claude Code, both get it with the same command.
It’s the same multi-agent pattern we already saw in the skill that makes Claude Code answer directly: a file of instructions, installed in every agent you have, instead of a different configuration per tool.
This is the design decision worth copying. Agent Reach doesn’t sit between your agent and the tools as a runtime layer: it installs the tools and then installs documentation that teaches the agent to call them directly. There’s nothing to keep running, and no layer to break when a backend changes.
agent-reach skill --uninstall removes them all again.
What about platforms that require login?
The cleanest path is to take the cookies from a browser where you’re already logged in:
agent-reach configure --from-browser chrome --platform twitter
--from-browser accepts chrome, firefox, edge, brave, and opera; --platform accepts twitter, xiaohongshu, bilibili, and xueqiu. There’s also an interactive setup wizard with agent-reach setup, and configure --stdin to pass a value without it ending up in your shell history.
Credentials stay local, in ~/.agent-reach/config.yaml with restricted permissions. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Two practical notes. First: automated access to these platforms goes against their terms of service, and the author says so straight up in the README; the recommendation is to use a secondary account instead of the one you actually use, and it’s sensible advice worth following. Second: installation happens from the main branch and not from a tagged release, so you get whatever’s current at that moment; that’s what agent-reach check-update and agent-reach watch are for, the latter designed for a scheduled task.
Neither of those is a reason to skip the tool. Both are reason to set it up thoughtfully: disposable account for social platforms, and the backends that don’t need setup—which are the ones most people will use every day—need no credentials at all.
Is it worth installing?
If your workflow with agents already means you copy content into the context by hand, yes. The YouTube, GitHub, RSS, and web reading backends don’t need an account, key, or recurring cost, and they cover most of what you’d want. The social platforms are there when you need them, with a setup cost you can decide separately.With 79,200 stars and growing at around 1,600 per week at the time this note was published, the maintenance question — the one that kills tools in this category — for now seems answered.