I have a confession: I became a moderator for a subreddit and immediately started building tools instead of, you know, moderating 😬.
NEW ACHIEVEMENT!!! “Distracted Moderator”
You have been granted mod privileges for a subreddit. You have chosen to write code instead!
Reward: “Technical Debt” +1 Wisdom, -1 Charisma
In my defense, my internal System AI made me do it (see ADHD posts).
If you’re a fan of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, the audiobook that the Hello Crawlers podcast covers, you know The System AI. It’s the omnipresent AI that drops people into a deadly dungeon and hands them just enough tools to survive, but never quite what they asked for. You work with what you’ve got or you die.
The “PipeDream”#
When the Hello Crawlers team asked for mod volunteers, I immediately offered to help. I’m a long-time patron and a genuine fan, so it felt like a natural fit. But almost immediately I spotted something I wanted to fix: posting YouTube videos to the subreddit was manual, inconsistent, and kind of tedious.
I had a vision. A beautiful, elaborate workflow. Claude-powered summaries, automatic posts, the whole thing. I built it in Pipedream, but I realized I should see what this new Devvit thing was — and I didn’t want the tool living somewhere only I could touch. So I pivoted, taking my high-level workflow — YouTube → Claude → Reddit post — into Devvit instead.
Then I actually looked at what Devvit allowed.
Devvit (Reddit’s platform for building apps and mod tools) has restrictions on which web endpoints you can call. There were pre-approved endpoints, but my original workflow hit a wall almost immediately. Claude wasn’t on the allowed list and I didn’t feel like waiting for approval.
B-B-B-Boss Battle!#
Here’s the thing about constraints: you can fight them or you can get curious about them. I like to get curious.
Digging through the allowed endpoints, I found Gemini was available by default. I hadn’t planned on using Gemini. But I also needed this tool to be free — the Hello Crawlers team was already delegating work to me, and the last thing I wanted was to hand them a monthly bill along with a new tool to learn.
Gemini’s free tier is generous. Genuinely, surprisingly generous.
Constraint solved. And honestly? The end result was better than my original plan.
What It Actually Does#
Just posting YouTube links is boring and doesn’t engage the community. The YouTube + Gemini Post Devvit App lets moderators set a YouTube playlist to watch, supply an API key, and generate dynamic content with a prompt they control.
That last part matters. I didn’t want to hardcode the AI behavior. Moderators will know their audience better than I do. Giving them a prompt they can tweak means they’re not dependent on me to change how the output feels. Even if I’m “accelerated” from the project, they can keep adjusting it without touching any code.
I think of it as a no-code control panel for the AI layer.
This was great! But I realized that I needed a way to test the prompts without re-creating the same post over and over.
So I also created a companion web app for testing output before anything goes live on the subreddit. It lets you try different models and verifies that your API key has the right access. If your key doesn’t have the right access, you get linked to the exact place to add it.
The app actually started as an AI Studio experiment. I prototyped the whole thing there first, but when it came time to publish, AI Studio was having technical issues. So I just threw it on Netlify. Took about ten minutes.
Devvit Was Easier Than I Expected#
If you’ve deployed something to Netlify or Vercel, you already understand the mental model. Devvit clicked for me pretty fast once I stopped overthinking it and realized they’re essentially single-page apps hosted by Reddit.
The Devvit Discord helped a lot. The community is genuinely welcoming and the
people there know their stuff. Shoutout to u/Beach-Brews who not
only helped me work through a problem but actually filed a bug on my behalf when
we discovered that the Devvit link type supported a body field — something that
wasn’t obvious from the docs.
That kind of help makes open source feel worth it.
Go Build Something#
NEW ACHIEVEMENT: “Free… As In Beer!”
You have shipped a thing! It is free! It is open source! Nobody had to learn a new tool.
Reward: Platinum “Your AI Bill is Due” Loot Box
The app is free, open source, and lives on the Reddit app directory. The source is on GitHub if you want to poke around or contribute. Share it with your favorite podcast or YouTuber.
And if you haven’t spent time in AI Studio yet, this project was my first real excuse to dig in. It’s a great sandbox. Go break something.
Finally — if you’re not already listening to Hello Crawlers, fix that! https://www.hellocrawlers.com/
Special thanks to Grant from the Podcast, who was my guinea pig test Mordecai!
