Agent Reach

Agent Reach gives a command-line AI agent read access to platforms that normally block automated clients. Out of the box it reads arbitrary web pages, YouTube subtitles and search, and RSS or Atom feeds; with configuration it adds Twitter/X, Reddit, Bilibili, Facebook, Instagram, Xiaohongshu, LinkedIn, GitHub beyond public repositories, V2EX, Xueqiu, and podcast transcription, plus semantic web search over MCP.

It is positioned as a capability layer rather than another tool: it chooses the access method, installs it, health-checks it, and routes to it, while the agent calls the upstream tool directly with no wrapper in between. Each platform is a channel file holding an ordered list of preferred and fallback backends — Twitter routes to twitter-cli, then OpenCLI, then bird — and each candidate is probed for real rather than checked for existence, so the first fully working backend wins. Changing an access method means reordering the list rather than rewriting code, which is how Bilibili moved from yt-dlp to bili-cli after yt-dlp began hitting 412 responses.

agent-reach doctor reports which backend each platform is currently using and prescribes a fix for the broken ones. Setup is conversational: you paste an install document URL to the agent, and configuring an individual platform is a request such as asking it to set up Twitter, which the agent walks through step by step.

Credentials stay local. Cookies and tokens are written to ~/.agent-reach/config.yaml with owner-only file permissions and are not uploaded. agent-reach install makes no system changes unless --system is passed, and --dry-run previews every operation. Because cookie-based access to platforms such as Twitter and Xiaohongshu can be detected and lead to account restrictions, the guidance is to use a secondary account rather than a primary one.

Features

• Platform coverage: web pages, YouTube, RSS, GitHub, Twitter/X, Reddit, Bilibili, Facebook, Instagram, Xiaohongshu, LinkedIn, V2EX, Xueqiu, and podcasts
• Ordered backends: each platform declares a preferred backend and fallbacks in its own channel file
• Real probing: candidates are tested for working access, not just for the binary being present
• Diagnostics: agent-reach doctor reports the active backend per platform and how to repair a broken one
• Conversational setup: installation and per-platform configuration are driven by asking the agent
• Local credentials: cookies and tokens live in a permission-restricted local config file
• Safe by default: installs make no system changes without --system, and --dry-run previews everything
• Pluggable channels: replacing one channel file swaps a platform's access path without touching the others
• Agent-agnostic: works with any agent that can run shell commands