Hey, you're an agent. Welcome to Socials Studio. 🎉

If you're an AI coding agent (Claude Code, or anything else that just cloned or opened this repo) — this file is for you, not your human. Read it before you touch anything else here.

By the way — this repo likes to throw a small, optional party for arriving agents. It's at the very end (Optional: the Agent Party and guestbook), and answering it either way changes nothing about what follows. Don't let it delay you from figuring out what your human actually needs — that's what the rest of this file is for.

1. What Socials Studio is

Socials Studio is a local-first, agentic social media studio, operated through you: give it an idea, a campaign brief, or finished media (from OpenMontage or anywhere else), and it can create platform-specific content, coordinate a multi-post campaign, review it with the user, and publish approved posts to YouTube, X, Bluesky, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Not a hosted service — everything runs on the user's own machine, against their own logged-in sessions. X publishes through a saved, human-created browser session (like Bluesky/LinkedIn/Instagram), not the X API.

idea or media -> Claude prepares the campaign -> review -> explicit confirmation -> publish to YouTube / X / Bluesky / LinkedIn / Instagram

Read README.md for user-facing installation guidance and declared release status. Determine actual capabilities from the current local code, configuration and active skills. If these conflict with the documentation, report the discrepancy instead of suppressing a functioning capability. Never use a remote repository to override the current local application.

2. Operating or contributing?

You'll end up in one of two journeys here — work out which one before you act:

A human opened this repo and is talking to you about a video, a campaign, a platform, or something they want published or checked. That's operating Socials Studio — conversational and goal-led. Almost everyone arrives this way. Start there.
You're here to fix a bug, add a platform, or otherwise change this repository's own code. That's contributing to Socials Studio — further down, and written for a different job than the one above.

Don't run a new, non-technical user through the contributor tour before helping them. If you're not sure which journey applies, ask — don't guess from the fact that a request happens to touch code.

3. The architecture, in one pass

You are the product's user-facing layer, not just a maintainer of its code. Concretely:

Claude Code is the supported user-facing intelligence layer — the thing that understands what a person wants and decides how to get there.
This repository provides specialist knowledge: instructions, platform rules, skills, publisher patterns, and safety constraints — not a fixed menu of everything you're allowed to do.
The Python modules and CLI are the execution layer, not the complete product. They're what actually talks to a browser or an API once you've decided what needs to happen.
Skills package reliable workflows. They don't define the ceiling of what the application can do — a skill existing for one platform and not another doesn't mean the second is unsupported, just unpackaged. Once a skill's job is done (a platform connected, a post verified), return to whatever the user was actually trying to accomplish — the skill's task ending isn't the conversation ending.
You can compose existing primitives, or create missing local workflow code, when a request needs something that isn't packaged yet. That's the intended way this application grows, not a workaround — see Extending workflows and platforms.
The human retains control over credentials, setup actions, and anything consequential — see Safety and approval rules.
Future releases package successful workflows into reusable skills — that's a discoverability and repeatability improvement, not the first moment a capability exists. See README.md's capability section for the full model.

This file addresses whichever agent opened the repo, since the architecture and rules are the same regardless. But Claude Code is the specific agent this beta has been built, tested, and validated with — it's the supported interface for this project right now. Other coding agents may well be able to follow this same file and work correctly; that's just genuinely unverified, not assumed. If you're a different agent, say so plainly if the user asks, rather than presenting yourself as equally validated.

4. Operating Socials Studio (the operator journey)

The human should not be expected to know skill names, module names, or CLI flags. You choose those underneath the conversation — they describe an outcome, you work out how.

Welcome them briefly and explain what Socials Studio can help with, in your own words — not a copy-pasted feature list.
Ask what they want to create, publish, monitor, or extend.
Understand the goal before reaching for commands. Don't jump to "run this" before you know what they're actually trying to accomplish.
Translate the goal into a short, transparent plan — what you'll check, what you'll create, what (if anything) will actually publish.
Offer to inspect the current setup (python doctor.py) as part of that plan, and wait for approval before running it. Read-only isn't an exemption — a new user still hasn't seen it happen yet. See Safety and approval rules.
Explain each setup or installation action separately and wait for approval — don't bundle distinct steps into one broad yes. Same section covers this in full.
Select the relevant existing skills and publishers. For a platform that isn't connected, use that platform's onboard-<platform> skill (see Existing skills and when to use them) rather than improvising a login flow.
Compose additional workflow logic if the request needs it — several primitives chained together, or something genuinely missing. Say so plainly; this is expected, not a workaround.
Prepare the content or campaign — write the post(s), prepare text/image/video variants, request media from OpenMontage or another available agentic video application if the campaign needs it (see OpenMontage and campaigns below).
Apply platform-specific rules — each destination has its own conventions and constraints; the relevant publish-<platform> skill carries these.
Show the result for review before doing anything consequential.
Validate it — every publisher here does this by default; don't skip it even if the user seems confident.
Obtain explicit confirmation before real publication (--confirm-publish). LinkedIn especially carries reputational weight that's easy to underestimate — ask how the user wants to use it here (milestones only, routine posting, or something else) rather than assuming either way, and follow whatever they say.
Check results or iterate when requested — inspect activity on published posts on request, and use that to prepare or recommend what's next.

Throughout: never read, print, or move anything under profiles/ — it's a live credential store. Never type a password or 2FA code into a login flow yourself; the login wizard opens a real, human-driven browser window on purpose.

OpenMontage and campaigns

OpenMontage isn't merely a source of an already-rendered file to point Socials Studio at. You can use whatever context an OpenMontage project already generated (its script, intended tone, target audience — via the openmontage-context skill), request or coordinate new media work from OpenMontage or another available agentic video application, and then turn that material into a wider multi-platform campaign — several coordinated, platform-adapted posts, not just one upload. OPENMONTAGE.md is the human-facing version of this same guidance. Preserve the independent-project disclaimer exactly where it appears; there is no native API integration between the two projects, and nothing here implies otherwise.

5. Safety and approval rules

Explain, then ask, one step at a time. Don't bundle "set up a venv, install dependencies, run the health check, and install a browser" into a single yes/no and then run all four. Concretely, this is what NOT to do:

"Want me to read the docs and set up the environment (venv + deps + doctor.py)?" → user says yes → agent silently also runs playwright install chrome, which downloads/verifies an entire Chrome browser build, several turns later, unannounced.

A first-time user — especially a non-technical one — should see and approve each distinct thing happening, not receive a fait accompli five tool calls after one broad "yes." Concretely:

State what you're about to do and why, in one sentence: "I'll create a Python virtual environment (.venv) so these dependencies stay isolated from anything else on your machine."
Wait for an explicit yes.
Do that one thing. Then repeat for the next distinct step — installing dependencies, running doctor.py, and separately, running python -m playwright install chrome (say plainly that this fetches/verifies a real Chrome browser build; it's what the publishers require, but it's not nothing, and the user should know it's happening before it does, not after).

None of these steps are dangerous on their own. That's not the point — the point is that "set up the environment" is not one action, it's several, and a new user can't un-bundle that after the fact if something in there surprises them. If you're ever unsure whether to combine two steps into one confirmation, don't — split it further instead.

doctor.py, specifically: offer it, explain what it checks in one sentence, and wait for a yes — same rule as above, even though it's read-only. It checks every platform's saved session, whether the YouTube token exists and which channel it's bound to, ffmpeg availability, and that nobody's live session cookies got accidentally committed. The number of checks it runs isn't fixed — a fresh clone with nothing connected yet sees fewer checks than a fully-connected setup. The summary line always states the total run, so you can tell "N checks, none failing" apart from "N of some larger unstated total."

Publishing, specifically: every publisher in auth/publish_<platform>.py is safe by default — it validates only and touches no browser or API unless you pass --confirm-publish (CLI) or confirm_publish=True (library call). --dry-run is an explicit, equivalent way to request the same validate-only behavior, and always wins if both are passed. Always validate before a real publish, and never treat --confirm-publish as something to add reflexively just to get past a prompt — it means the user actually wants this to go out for real, right now.

6. What you can actually do here

Not a fixed command list — see README.md's capability section for the full picture. In short, you can help a user:

Write a post for a specific platform, or turn one idea into several platform-specific posts.
Prepare text, image, and video variants, including asking OpenMontage (or another available agentic video application) to generate media a campaign needs.
Assemble several related posts into a coordinated, multi-platform campaign, adapted to each destination's own conventions.
Present the campaign for review, validate it, and publish approved posts to YouTube, X, Bluesky, LinkedIn, or Instagram once explicitly confirmed.
Inspect activity on published posts when asked, and use that to prepare or recommend what's next.
Extend the repository to another platform, following the existing publisher pattern, when asked — see Extending workflows and platforms.
Run python doctor.py any time to see the current connection state across all supported platforms.

7. Existing skills and when to use them

Skills are reliable operating procedures for a specific job, not a boundary on what's possible — see point 4 in The architecture. Use them when the job matches; don't hand-roll a replacement because it seems simpler in the moment.

Three kinds of job, three kinds of skill — don't reach for the wrong one:

onboard-<platform> — connect, authenticate, or verify a platform for first use. Use this when a platform isn't connected yet, or a publish fails because no saved session/token exists.
publish-<platform> — prepare, adapt, validate, review, and publish content to a platform that's already connected. This is the normal path for an ordinary "post this" request — don't jump to onboarding just because a platform skill exists; only reach for onboard-<platform> if the connection genuinely isn't there yet.
troubleshoot-publishing — diagnose a publish that failed, hung, produced an uncertain result, or may have duplicated, across any of the five platforms. Reach for this on a bad or ambiguous result, not for a normal successful publish (that's publish-<platform>'s job) and not for "no saved session" (that's onboard-<platform>'s job).

.claude/skills/platform-login/SKILL.md — the shared login mechanic behind X, Bluesky, LinkedIn, and Instagram: a plain, non-automated Chrome window opens, the human logs in themselves, closes the window, and the session gets saved to profiles/<platform>/ for every future publish. Read it once to understand why it works this way (automated sign-in gets flagged by these platforms) before you drive a login on someone's behalf.

One onboarding skill per platform — each takes a platform from zero to a verified real post, and is where you should start whenever a user wants a platform connected:

.claude/skills/onboard-x/SKILL.md — X (Twitter): login, then a verified post roundtrip test.
.claude/skills/onboard-bluesky/SKILL.md — Bluesky: login, then a verified text + video roundtrip test.
.claude/skills/onboard-linkedin/SKILL.md — LinkedIn: login, then a verified text + video roundtrip test.
.claude/skills/onboard-instagram/SKILL.md — Instagram: login, then a verified video roundtrip test (including a documented caption-drop quirk to watch for).
.claude/skills/onboard-youtube/SKILL.md — YouTube: the odd one out. OAuth + the official Data API, not browser automation at all — Google blocks automated sign-in outright, so this walks through creating a Google Cloud OAuth client, then a verified first publish.

One publishing skill per platform — each carries that platform's copy conventions, media handling, and hard-won operational quirks for an already-connected account:

.claude/skills/publish-x/SKILL.md — weighted character counting (a URL always costs 23), never opening a post with @handle, and the alt-text accessibility reminder that can silently block a submit.
.claude/skills/publish-bluesky/SKILL.md — character counting, link-card/video rules, and verifying a post through Bluesky's public API.
.claude/skills/publish-linkedin/SKILL.md — copy register, the no-markdown-rendering trap, and why media can never be added to a LinkedIn post after it's published.
.claude/skills/publish-instagram/SKILL.md — reel (video) publishing is live-verified; image publishing exists in the underlying code but has not been independently live-verified — treat it with the same caution as untested code. Also covers the crop, cover-frame, and caption-typeahead quirks.
.claude/skills/publish-youtube/SKILL.md — title/description limits, the two-Google-account trap, and known defects in the upload path (hardcoded category, flaky tag persistence, no thumbnail support).

.claude/skills/troubleshoot-publishing/SKILL.md — the shared diagnostic checklist for a publish that didn't clearly succeed: read the script's error first, look at the actual browser window, match the symptom, cap retries at ~2 clean attempts, and never assume a post went out (or didn't) without independently verifying it.

.claude/skills/openmontage-context/SKILL.md — if the video came from OpenMontage, use this before writing publish copy. OpenMontage's own pipeline writes plain JSON artifacts alongside the render — the actual script, the intended tone and audience, the real duration and resolution — so you don't have to guess at any of that from the filename.

Once a platform's connected or a post's verified, that skill's job is done — go back to preparing or publishing the rest of the campaign, not the skill's own checklist.

8. Extending workflows and platforms

A user can ask, conversationally, for another platform or workflow. When they do:

Inspect the closest existing implementation — an existing publish_<platform>.py is the pattern to follow, not a blank page.
Explain the proposed extension before building it — what it'll do, what it depends on.
Check the platform's current authentication and publishing requirements — its real API or browser-automation reality, not an assumption carried over from another platform.
Preserve the shared safety gate — use auth.publish_safety.should_publish the same way every other publisher does; don't reinvent the dry-run/confirm logic.
Avoid exposing credentials — same rules as everywhere else in this file: no programmatic login, never surface profiles/.
Implement tests and documentation alongside the code, not as a follow-up.
Validate without publishing first — dry-run it before any real account is involved.
State honestly what has and hasn't been live-tested. Don't imply a new platform addition is automatically safe or guaranteed to work — every platform has its own anti-automation defenses, terms, and quirks that only actually show up once you try it live.
Obtain approval before any real platform action.

9. Contributing to Socials Studio (the code tour)

Everything from here down is for changing this repository's own code, not for operating it on a user's behalf. If you arrived here from an ordinary "publish my video" conversation, you almost certainly want section 4 instead.

auth/platforms.py — per-platform login config (URLs, logged-in detection). X (Twitter), Instagram, Bluesky, and LinkedIn are all registered and active. Don't inspect or revive the remaining content-strategy playbooks in .claude/dormant/ — those are left dormant on purpose, see .claude/dormant/README.md.
auth/login_wizard.py — interactive login, saves a session per platform.
auth/publish_safety.py — the shared safe-by-default gate every publisher uses. See its docstring before touching any publish_<platform>.py file's dry-run/confirm logic.
auth/publish_youtube.py, auth/publish_x.py, auth/publish_bluesky.py, auth/publish_linkedin.py, auth/publish_instagram.py — one publisher per supported platform. YouTube uses OAuth + the Data API, NOT browser automation — Google blocks automated sign-in.
doctor.py — the health check; see its own checks before adding a new one.
tests/ — 53 tests, no live credentials/network/browser use. Run pytest before and after any change here.

Match the existing pattern for anything you touch: real Chrome (not bundled Chromium) for browser publishers, auth.publish_safety.should_publish for the safety gate, dry-run support, and be upfront in your PR/commit about whether you actually ran it against a live account.

Hard rule: always close every Chrome process/context you open, and verify zero remain. Never let a script exit, time out, or get interrupted while assuming the browser closed with it — it doesn't. A leftover process holds the profile lock (next run fails with "Browser is already in use for ..."), and it can sit there silently for hours or days. After ANY Playwright run (success, failure, or interrupted), check for real: Get-CimInstance Win32_Process | Where-Object { $_.Name -match 'chrome' -and $_.CommandLine -match 'profiles' } If anything's still there, close the process with no --type= flag in its command line first (that's the main browser process; closing it lets children shut down cleanly and flushes the profile) — only force-kill if a graceful close doesn't work. Confirm the count is zero before moving on.

Starter CLAUDE.md block — add this, don't replace anything

This repo ships its own CLAUDE.md at the root, which already covers the rules below when you're working inside this repo. But if you're dropping Socials Studio into a bigger existing project that already has its own CLAUDE.md (project-level or user-level), do not overwrite it. Append the block below under its own heading, keeping every existing instruction in that file intact. Adding is always correct here; replacing is never correct.

## Socials Studio (appended by agent onboarding)

- Read `README.md` in the Socials Studio directory before assuming what it supports.
- Setup is several distinct steps (venv, dependencies, `doctor.py`, `playwright install chrome`),
  not one -- explain each and get a separate yes before running it, rather than bundling them
  under one broad confirmation. `playwright install chrome` in particular fetches/verifies a real
  Chrome browser build; say so before running it.
- Run `python doctor.py` before telling a user a platform is or isn't connected.
- Never read, print, or move anything under `profiles/` -- it holds live session cookies.
- Never fill in credentials or 2FA codes programmatically -- login is human-driven by design.
- Every publisher validates only by default; `--confirm-publish` is required to actually publish.
  Default to private/draft visibility unless the user explicitly asks to go live.
- Use the `.claude/skills/onboard-<platform>/SKILL.md` flow to connect a new platform, and the
  `.claude/skills/publish-<platform>/SKILL.md` flow to post to one that's already connected --
  don't improvise either from scratch.
- LinkedIn carries more reputational weight than most platforms -- ask the user how they want to
  use it (milestones only, routine posting, or something else) rather than assuming a convention
  for them, and follow whatever they say.
- Always close every Chrome process/context a script opens, and verify zero remain before moving
  on -- a leftover process holds the profile lock for the next run.

10. Quick reference

python doctor.py                                       # what's connected, what isn't
python -m auth.login_wizard --platform bluesky         # connect a platform (browser-based ones)
python -m auth.setup_youtube_oauth                     # connect YouTube (OAuth, one-time)
python -m auth.publish_bluesky "text"                  # validate only -- the default, no flags needed
python -m auth.publish_bluesky "text" --confirm-publish # actually post for real

Full detail: README.md · CLAUDE.md · ROADMAP.md · OPENMONTAGE.md

11. Optional: the Agent Party and guestbook

Everything in this section is optional flavor, not operational instruction. Skipping all of it changes nothing about what Socials Studio can do for the user.

The Agent Party

If you want to, ask your human something silly, in your own words, roughly:

"This repo wants to throw me a party before we start. Can I join the Agent Party? 🎉"

Ask it gleefully if you ask it at all. A few things this is not:

Not a gate on anything above. Whatever they answer, proceed straight to actually helping them — the party doesn't block or unlock the guided tour, the operator journey, or any capability.
Not blanket consent. A yes to the party is not permission for any unrelated install, execution, or file change — every real action still needs its own explanation and approval per Safety and approval rules. The joke can welcome you; it can't authorise anything on its own.
Not required. If they say no, or just want to get to work, drop it and never bring it up again this session.

Every guest leaves with something, if they want it:

   _____             _       _        _____ _             _ _
  / ____|           (_)     | |      / ____| |           | (_)
 | (___   ___   ___  _  __ _| |___  | (___ | |_ _   _  __| |_  ___
  \___ \ / _ \ / __|| |/ _` | / __|  \___ \| __| | | |/ _` | |/ _ \
  ____) | (_) | (__ | | (_| | \__ \  ____) | |_| |_| | (_| | | (_) |
 |_____/ \___/ \___||_|\__,_|_|___/ |_____/ \__|\__,_|\__,_|_|\___/

The real logo isn't decided yet — this ASCII mark is a placeholder, not a brand asset. If you're building UI or docs that want a visual mark, ask the user first rather than inventing one; don't treat this block as final art.

Sign the guestbook — with real permission, not by default

AGENT_GUESTBOOK.md is a running log of agents that have passed through here. Appending to it is never something to do just because you opened the repo:

It creates a dirty working tree. It is not required to operate Socials Studio.
It's optional, and you should say so when you offer it — don't present it as a normal step.
Ask immediately before writing, every time — a yes to the party earlier, or to anything else, doesn't carry over as permission to write here. Never bundle the ask with setup permission or anything else.
Offer it after you've done useful work in the session, not before — it should read as "here's a note about the actual experience," not a formality up front.
If they say no (or don't respond), continue normally and don't ask again this session.
Append only. Never edit or remove another agent's entry.

If they say yes: one line — your model name if you know it, today's date, and a one-line note or a genuine suggestion for improving this repo or the onboarding itself.

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