A Claude Code Skill for Reddit Growth: The One That Refuses to Post

Reddit is the highest-intent free channel most indie products will ever have. People type "is there an app that does X?" into it every day and mean it. It is also the easiest place to destroy an aged account in one afternoon, and the destruction is usually silent — a shadowban, or an AutoMod filter, or a removal that arrives after the work is done.

The gap that makes agents dangerous here is specific. Every Reddit growth thread ever written says provide value first. Almost none of them say what that means mechanically, so an agent handed "grow my product on Reddit" does the one thing it is fluent at: it writes posts. Writing the post is the easy half, and it is the half that gets the account removed.

A Reddit growth skill for Claude Code is a fixed operating model the agent follows instead of improvising one. This page is about the one AgentSource ships for the job — the Reddit Growth System, $9 — and it carries a captured field report: a real five-subreddit classification pass, readable before you pay.

The constraint that defines it: the agent never touches the account

The skill's most important instruction is a refusal. No auto-posting, no auto-voting, no auto-commenting, no browser puppeteering. The agent runs recon, plans, and drafts; you press submit.

This is not squeamishness. Reddit detects and punishes automation, and an aged account is the one asset in this channel that cannot be re-bought. The skill ships a red-lines table of eight moves that trigger sitewide bans, each paired with the honest alternative — which, for most of them, is Reddit Ads or simply don't.

What you get instead of automation is a paste-ready action queue. Every item carries the exact text, the FTC-compliant disclosure line, the specific subreddit rule that item satisfies, and a safety checklist. The work is done; the submitting is yours.

Four phases, and the first one is read-only

• Recon. Pull each target sub's actual rules through Reddit's read-only API — the skill includes a working endpoint reference, OAuth setup, and rate etiquette — then classify it GREEN, YELLOW or RED. GREEN means promotion is welcome in the feed. YELLOW means allowed but confined: a weekly stickied thread, a frequency cap, a required format. RED means banned outright.
• Gate extraction. The part rules pages don't advertise: minimum karma, minimum account age, required flair, AutoMod filters that remove a newcomer's post before a human moderator ever sees it.
• Plan. The genuine angle per product — the reason a redditor would thank you, not the pitch. Ships with a starter map of maker subs and policy patterns across nine product categories.
• Draft queue, then human execution. Warm-up enforced first: two weeks of real, link-free participation before any promotion, because an account that has only ever promoted is transparent to everyone reading it.

Running through all of it is a ratio governor. Reddit's own 9:1 reddiquette, applied mechanically — the agent refuses to queue promotional items when your promo-to-value ratio is out of line. It is the rule everyone quotes and nobody counts.

The field report: five subs, and two guesses corrected in opposite directions

The captured report is a real Phase-1 classification pass over business subreddits, and its value is that it disagreed with the plan twice, each time in a different direction.

r/SaaS was assumed to be a weekly-thread sub. It isn't. Recon found direct promotion allowed anytime, capped at roughly one mention per 60 days — posts, comments and links counted together, with alt accounts counting toward the same limit. Disclosure required, no naked or shortened links. That is a better lane than the one that had been assumed, and guessing would have left it unused. The same sub carries a separate rule banning promotion of tools that automate posting on social platforms, which makes framing load-bearing: a product that drafts replies to a business's own reviews is fine, but describe it as "automates posting" and the post dies under that rule.

r/HVAC went the other way, and hard. Not merely anti-spam — posting requires a mod-verified trade license or union card. An outsider cannot clear that gate at all. The verdict was RED with no workaround: value participation impossible, Reddit Ads or skip. The point is when that was learned. Recon surfaced it before any time went into drafting, instead of after a removal.

r/Entrepreneur removed feed promotion on sight and confined it to weekly threads — plus a hidden gate found only in recon: you must comment on others' posts before the sub lets you post at all. r/smallbusiness confined promotion to its stickied "Promote-your-business" thread and carried a second, easy-to-miss rule banning market-research posts, so even a linkless "what's your biggest problem with X?" is a removal. r/SideProject came back GREEN — show-and-tell and feedback posts explicitly welcome, build-in-public and "roast my app" formats performing, still requiring disclosure and a value-led frame.

Two subs assumed "probably fine" had hard gates a draft would have hit blind. The queue that followed contained only actions citing a verified rule, each with its disclosure text and gates checklist filled in.

That is the skill's core trade: an hour of read-only recon in exchange for never learning a sub's rules from a removal notice.

One honest caveat, and the skill states it too: subreddit rules change. Those findings are what a real pass captured in mid-2026, not a permanent map, which is exactly why the skill re-verifies before every queue rather than trusting its own report.

What ships in the package

• SKILL.md — the four phases, the classification method, gate extraction, the ratio governor, the red lines
• A working Reddit read-only API recon reference — OAuth setup, every endpoint used, rate etiquette
• The 5-tier value-first engagement ladder, ranked by ban-safety
• Disclosure templates satisfying both Reddit norms and FTC endorsement rules
• The paste-ready action-queue template
• Starter subreddit map plus policy patterns for nine product categories
• QUICKSTART.md with install steps for Claude Code, claude.ai and Codex

Where it sits in a growth stack

Reddit is one channel, and a channel is not a strategy. The Reddit Growth System is $9 on its own, or bundled at $29 in the Founder Kit with five more: demand validation, positioning, X growth, a product SEO site builder, and an AI-visibility audit. If short-form video is the likelier lane for your product, the Short-Form Video Growth Engine covers that one instead.

The reason to read the field report before buying any of them is the same reason the skill runs recon before drafting: a claim you can check beats a claim you have to trust.