reddit-fetch — Claude Code skill: read Reddit via JSON API

What reddit-fetch does

Append .json to any Reddit URL and you get structured data — in theory. In practice Reddit blocks bots: curl returns 403 nearly every time regardless of User-Agent, and a fresh Playwright navigation to reddit.com lands on a network-security challenge. The skill's trick is arriving through a DuckDuckGo result redirect, which plants a Reddit session cookie and opens direct .json access for the rest of the browser session.

One hop per session. Search html.duckduckgo.com for site:reddit.com/r/SUBREDDIT, then grab the first result's full href — it carries a rut token, and the bare redirect URL without it returns 400. Navigating to that href lands on a real Reddit page and sets the cookie. After that, go straight to search.json, hot.json or comments/POST_ID.json and parse the body. Wrap the parse in try/catch: a lapsed session serves the challenge page instead of JSON, and you redo the hop.

Reddit throttles hard even once you're through, so fire requests one at a time with sleep 2 or sleep 3 between them. Zero-byte responses mean waiting 3–5 seconds; a 429 means backing off 10–15 seconds. If Playwright complains that the browser is already in use, pkill -f ms-playwright-mcp clears the stale profile. There's a fallback too — open the thread in a browser and read it off the rendered page.