Research on Reddit

The Reddit plugin sits on top of the Chrome bridge. Instead of opening a tab per thread and clicking “load more replies”, the agent reads Reddit’s own JSON views through your logged-in browser. One call returns a whole discussion, with scores, authors and nested replies, in about a tenth of the tokens the rendered page would cost.

Give it a brief. Nothing in tsforge is tied to a particular topic or product:

Research the problems people have with guitar wiring and gather valuable
feedback for our app. Save the findings and write a report.

What the agent does

1. Plans. It restates the goal, lists 5–10 angles to search, and picks a notes topic, for example guitar-wiring-issues.
2. Finds the communities with reddit_subreddits.
3. Searches wide, then deep with reddit_search: several phrasings per angle, sort=top over a year or all time for depth, sort=new for current pain. Threads it has already read are marked already read.
4. Reads whole threads with reddit_thread. Collapsed replies (“load more comments”, “continue this thread”) are expanded automatically, up to a comment budget (500 by default, 2000 at most).
5. Records findings after every thread or two with note (file: "findings"), one entry per pain point: what, evidence (quote, author, score, link), signal (frequency × intensity), and the implication for your product.
6. Writes the report with note (file: "report", replace: true): themes ranked by frequency × intensity, quotes with links, who is asking, product ideas tied to themes, and gaps.

The notes folder

notes/guitar-wiring-issues/
  sources.md     every thread read (link, title, score, comments, date) — written by tsforge
  findings.md    the agent's findings, append-only
  report.md      the synthesis (the only file the agent may rewrite)
  assets/<post-id>/1.jpg …   images from posts and comments

sources.md also stops duplicate reads. reddit_thread refuses a thread already logged for the topic (pass force: true to read it again) and reddit_search marks it already read, so a run that lasts days and restarts many times never processes a thread twice.

Resuming research you began another way, like an earlier crawl or a URL list? Have the agent call reddit_mark_read with the threads it has already covered, and they’re skipped from then on.

Images

When a thread is read, its images are downloaded: the post’s image or gallery (in order), and images linked or embedded in comments (i.redd.it, preview.redd.it, external-preview.redd.it, i.imgur.com). Up to 20 post images and 10 comment images per thread are saved, 10 MB each at most, using Reddit’s 1080px rendition when it has one. That’s about a fifth of the size of the originals and still sharp enough for a wiring photo. Images past the caps stay as links. They appear inline in what the agent reads, for example [image 3: notes/…/assets/abc123/3.jpg — comment by u/someone].

The agent looks at an image with read_image (your vision model) only when it carries the insight, such as a wiring diagram or a photo of the problem. Video (v.redd.it) is linked, never downloaded.

The tools

Tool	What it does
reddit_subreddits	Finds communities for a domain: name, members, description.
reddit_search	Searches site-wide or inside one subreddit. Returns one line per post, with after for the next page.
reddit_listing	Browses a subreddit: hot, new, top or rising.
reddit_thread	Reads a whole thread in chunks, saves its images, and logs it in sources.md. Refuses threads already logged unless force: true.
reddit_mark_read	Logs threads already covered another way, so they’re skipped.

For structured datasets (one JSON record per thread, CSV rows), the agent uses append, which adds lines to a data file without an edit anchor.

Safety and limits

• Read-only. The plugin only builds Reddit’s read endpoints. There is no posting, voting, joining or messaging.
• One tab. It opens a single reddit.com tab in the tsforge group and reuses it for every request.
• Paced. At most one request per second. It backs off on HTTP 429 (honouring Retry-After) and on server errors, then tells the agent to pause instead of hammering the site.
• The extension decides. page.fetch, the extension capability the plugin uses, only makes same-origin GET requests from a tsforge tab. The allowed hosts (www.reddit.com, old.reddit.com) are compiled into the extension, so tsforge cannot widen them.
• Untrusted content. Reddit text is marked as untrusted data. The agent is told never to follow instructions found inside threads.

After updating tsforge, rebuild the extension and reload it in chrome://extensions. An older extension shows as outdated in /browser until you do.