Research Reddit customer pain points with a skill

The author replaced a Reddit research agent with a Codex skill that finds pain points, verifies communities, collects evidence, clusters problems, and analyzes commercial signals.

What They Did

The author rebuilt a Reddit customer-research workflow as a Codex skill instead of a separate agent stack. Codex handled the reasoning, web access, tool execution, filesystem access, and chat flow; the skill defined the methodology, included a human approval checkpoint before main research, and used small Python helpers only for deterministic tasks like validation, scoring, canonical URLs, deduplication, and artifact generation.

How It Went

It produced the same kind of structured research flow the earlier agent aimed for: finding pain points, verifying communities, collecting evidence, clustering problems, and analyzing commercial signals. The post gives no benchmark numbers or side-by-side performance results, so the claimed win is simpler architecture and continued follow-up in the same conversation.

Worth Knowing

The main catch is that this was built as a demonstration and depends on Codex as the harness, rather than a portable standalone agent runtime.