# Three of the four skills are one engine, and the default search mode has no date filter > A set of agent skills for Reddit market, user and product research, delivered through a third-party service rather than through Reddit's own API. Three of the four skills are the same engine under different names, and the search mode you get by default cannot be scoped to a date range. **lignertys/reddit-research-skills** — Reddit research skills for Claude Code and AI agents - Repository: https://github.com/lignertys/reddit-research-skills - Website: https://reddapi.dev/developers - Stars: 1,219 · Forks: 1 - Language: Python - License: MIT - Published: 2026-09-10 · Updated: 2026-09-10 · Language: en - Canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/lignertys-reddit-research-skills ## Three of the four skills are one engine under three names The skills list is the whole product, and it is shorter than it looks. Three of the four wrap the same engine. The canonical skill is framed as market research, user research and product validation, and it is the one carrying the query playbooks for competitor research, niche validation and trend tracking. A second skill is the original name for that same engine, described as kept live for existing installs and fully functional standalone, with new installs pointed at the canonical name because the playbooks are there. A third is a reference version of the same engine with the research framing removed, reduced to endpoints, parameters, response schemas and error codes, for a developer who wants the documentation and nothing else. So the choice between them is a choice of framing, not of capability. The legacy name is a compatibility surface kept alive on purpose, which is a reasonable thing to do and worth saying plainly, because the alternative is breaking the installs that already exist. The fourth is different. Lead discovery is a separate feature with its own scoring and classification, and it is the only one of the four that sits behind a paid plan. One detail is easy to miss and matters for installation: the install command takes a skill name, so which of the three framings you get is decided at install time rather than at run time. ## The default mode cannot be scoped to a date, and the count stops at a hundred Two properties of the search interface decide what questions this tool can answer, and both are in the documentation as parenthetical remarks rather than as limitations. The first is that semantic search, which is the default mode, has no date filter. A second mode over the same archive returns a similarity score and does support working date filters, and it is described as the mode to use when a question is scoped to a date range. That means a request about what people said in the last quarter does not work with the settings you get by default. Nothing errors; the search simply runs over the whole archive. For research work, where the period is usually the point, that is the difference between an answer and an answer about the wrong window. The second is the result count. The default mode reports exact counts up to a cap of a hundred. So a finding of eighty-four discussions is a real number, and a finding of several thousand is not something this interface can distinguish from a capped result. Any statement of the form there are only this many discussions is safe below the cap and unsupported above it. A third thing is worth knowing about the pipeline. The default mode performs keyword extraction with a language model and can add a summary, which means the words that matched the archive are not necessarily the words in the request. That is usually helpful and occasionally not, and it is the normal behaviour of a semantic index rather than a defect. ## Not needing Reddit authorisation has a second reading The document states two facts about access that sit oddly next to each other. First, this is a third-party service and not something official from the platform. Second, no authorisation or application registration with the platform is needed. Read together, those mean Reddit data is being reached through somebody else's arrangement with Reddit, and this repository contains none of the terms of that arrangement. For a research tool that is a fact to be comfortable with rather than an obstacle, since the alternative for most people is a registration process and a review queue. It also means there is no direct relationship with the platform to appeal to if access changes, and no way to check from here what the service is permitted to do with what it retrieves. The second pair of facts is about limits. Access is not unlimited: it is gated by rate limits tied to a plan, the plan and quota table lives in a file inside one of the skill directories rather than in the main document, and an invalid or exhausted key returns HTTP 429. So there are three distinct failure modes a user should expect. A missing key, an exhausted quota, and a valid request that is rate limited, all of which surface as the same status code or as an empty result depending on where the check happens. The skill is told to treat a rate-limited response as a stop rather than a retry, which is the right default for a quota you are being charged for by the call. The one thing the document is careful about is scope: it says explicitly that the service is not official. That sentence is doing more work than it looks. ## The lead finder is a different feature, and it is the one behind a paid plan Lead discovery behaves differently from the other three skills in kind, not just in name. It looks for posts with buying intent, scores each one from zero to a hundred, and sorts them into five categories: pain point, solution request, complaint, feature request, and comparison. Those five are a usable taxonomy for outbound work, and they are the service's own rather than an open standard, so a pipeline built on them is coupled to this provider. The score deserves a caveat that the document does not spell out. A zero to a hundred rating comes from a service whose internals are not in this repository, and it is not described as a probability of purchase. Treat it as a ranking that puts some order on a large set of posts, which is genuinely useful, rather than as a measurement. The three other skills return discussions. The lead skill returns a scored, classified shortlist. That difference in output shape is why it is a separate product rather than another framing of the same one, and it is also why it is the only skill that requires a paid plan rather than a key. The categories are also the interesting part analytically. A pain point and a solution request are different intentions from a complaint, and a comparison post is a different intention again: it usually names alternatives, which makes it the most valuable of the five for anyone mapping a competitive landscape, and the least useful for anyone looking for people with a problem to solve. ## Installation is a URL and a name, so the name is part of the install There is one install command, and it takes two arguments: where the skills live and which skill to take. ```bash npx skills add https://github.com/lignertys/reddit-research-skills --skill reddit-research ``` The repository is not published as a package. The skills are fetched from a repository address by name, which means the name is not a label on something you already have, it is the thing that gets selected. Changing the name argument to the legacy one gets you the same engine with the older framing, and changing it to the reference one gets you the documentation-only version. Nothing about the install step is reversible other than by installing a different name, so the choice matters more than a single flag usually would. There is also a two-step shape that the document does not draw attention to. The skill is installed first, and the key is obtained separately, from the service. So a working install is not a working tool, and the failure appears later, at the first request, as a rejected key rather than as a problem with the install. After that, there is no command to learn. The usage section is five example prompts in natural language, and the skill is expected to translate them into service calls and return discussions with engagement metrics. The word doing the work there is metrics: what comes back is a set of threads and how much attention they got, and any conclusion drawn from them is the agent's, not the service's. ## The repository ships integration manifests for two agent platforms The tree is small and the contents say more than the summary line does. There is a Claude Code plugin directory, which is how a repository of skills declares itself to that tool. There is also a single extension manifest file named for a different agent platform entirely. So the project is installable into two specific hosts, and the one-line summary names one of them and then says and other agents, which undersells what is actually in the repository. The rest of the layout is conventional: a skills directory holding the four skills, a references directory, a scripts directory, a supporting document, and the licence. Three of those are not mentioned anywhere in the visible document. The supporting document, the references directory and the scripts directory exist and are unexplained from the front page, so a reader has to browse the tree to find out whether there is material worth reading. The quota table that the access section defers to is in one of those skill directories, so the one number a user most needs is the one number that is hardest to find. The declared homepage is worth noting too. It points at the service's developer documentation rather than at this repository, which means a link labelled as the project's home leads somewhere a reader can read about the service but nothing about the skills, their versions, or their history. ## One release, from February, with commits continuing to September The version history is one line long, and the dates around it tell the real story. There is a single release, numbered one point zero, published in February 2026. The default branch was pushed in September 2026. So there has been no tagged release in seven months while the repository has continued to receive commits, which means a user installing from a release gets February's state and a user cloning gets September's. Nothing in the repository is not marked as archived, so the project is not finished or abandoned; it is simply not releasing, and there is no way to tell from the outside whether the four skills have changed since February or whether only their documentation has. The trends capability has a similar scoping caveat to the search modes. It reports the named entities being discussed inside a date window, and compares that window against the previous one. So the output is a growth figure relative to an adjacent period, not a level, and not a comparison against the same period a year earlier. For a question about whether interest is rising, that is the right shape. For a question about how much interest there is, it is not an answer, and the interface does not offer a total. Combined with the capped result count, the two numeric outputs this tool offers are both relative or bounded. That is a reasonable design for a search interface over a large corpus, and it is worth knowing before you build a number on top of it. ## Conclusion This is a thin repository with a wide surface, and the useful reading is that it is a client rather than a capability. Four skills, three engines' worth of behaviour, one external service, and an API key in the loop. That means the research workflow is reproducible only as long as the service is, and the licence on the code here says nothing about the data. Two things to check before relying on it for actual research. The default search mode returns no date filter, so a question about a period cannot be answered with the default, and the exact result count stops at a hundred, which means a thin tail is indistinguishable from a capped one. And the access model is a third party reading a platform without that platform's own authorisation, gated by plan limits, so the terms governing the data path are somewhere other than this repository. For lead discovery the 0 to 100 score is a ranking from a service whose internals you cannot inspect, and the five lead categories are its taxonomy rather than an open standard. ## FAQ ### What is reddit-research-skills? A set of four skills that give Claude Code and other agents Reddit research capability through a third-party service, covering market research, user research, product validation, trend analysis and subreddit discovery. Three of the four wrap the same engine and differ only in framing; the fourth is a separate lead-finding feature. ### Do I need Reddit API credentials to use these skills? No. The document states the service is a third party rather than something official from the platform, and that no Reddit authorisation or app registration is needed. You do need a key from that service, access is limited by plan-based rate limits, and an invalid or exhausted key returns HTTP 429. ### Which skill should I install from reddit-research-skills? The canonical one for a new install, because the legacy name is the same engine kept live for existing installs and the reference one is the same engine reduced to endpoints, parameters, response schemas and error codes. The install command takes the skill name as an argument, so the choice is made at install time rather than when you run it. ### Can reddit-research-skills filter search results by date? Not in the default mode, which the document states has no date filter. A separate mode over the same archive returns a similarity score and does support working date filters, and is described as the mode to use when a question is scoped to a date range. The default mode also reports exact result counts only up to a cap of one hundred. ### What does the reddit-leads skill in reddit-research-skills do? It finds Reddit posts with buying intent, scores each from zero to a hundred, and classifies them into five lead types: pain point, solution request, complaint, feature request and comparison. It is the only one of the four skills that requires a paid plan rather than a key. ## Sources - [License: MIT](https://github.com/lignertys/reddit-research-skills/blob/main/LICENSE) - [lignertys/reddit-research-skills on GitHub](https://github.com/lignertys/reddit-research-skills) - [Project website](https://reddapi.dev/developers) - [README](https://github.com/lignertys/reddit-research-skills/blob/main/README.md) - [Releases](https://github.com/lignertys/reddit-research-skills/releases) --- Hysen Labs editorial analysis, written from the project's own repository and release notes. Cite the canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/lignertys-reddit-research-skills