How we built an open-source CLI for social media automation (and what we learned)

#ai #cli #agents #socialmedia

Today we're launching Simplified CLI on Product Hunt — an open-source command-line tool for publishing to 10 social platforms, generating AI images, and pulling analytics, all from the terminal.

I wanted to share the story behind it: the problem we saw, the technical decisions we made, and what surprised us along the way.

The problem

We're the team behind Simplified.com — a marketing platform used by thousands of teams. Over time we noticed a pattern: more and more of our power users were developers, AI engineers, and founders who wanted to integrate social media into their automated workflows.

They'd ask things like:

"Can I post from a GitHub Action after a release?"
"Can my AI agent publish the content it generates?"
"Can I batch-schedule 30 posts from a JSON file?"

The answer should have been obvious: build a CLI. But building a CLI that actually covers all 10 platforms properly is non-trivial — each platform has different media requirements, character limits, and API quirks.

What we built

Simplified CLI covers:

Publishing: Instagram (image, video, Reels, Stories), TikTok, LinkedIn (profiles + pages), YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, Threads, Bluesky, Google Business Profile, and TikTok Business.

AI image generation: We integrated 20+ models directly into the CLI — Flux Realism, Flux Kontext Pro, OpenAI image models, Stability AI, Google Imagen 4, Recraft, Ideogram, and more. You can generate an image and publish it in a single pipeline.

Analytics: Pull engagement data, follower counts, reach, and more across platforms.

JSON-native output: Every command returns structured JSON. This was a deliberate design decision — it makes it trivial to chain commands, pipe output to other tools, and integrate into AI agent workflows.

The Claude Code plugin

One of the most interesting integrations we built is the Claude Code plugin. Developers using Claude Code can install it in two commands:

/plugin marketplace add celeryhq/simplified-cli
/plugin install simplified-cli

This opens up a genuinely new workflow: an AI agent that can research a topic, generate an image, write a caption, and publish — all autonomously. We've used it internally for our own content workflows.

Technical decisions we're happy about

TypeScript + tsup: We write TypeScript and bundle to a single CJS file via tsup. Fast builds, zero runtime overhead, and full type safety across the codebase.

Single unified API: Rather than implementing per-platform adapters and dealing with 10 different auth flows, SDKs, and rate limits ourselves, we route everything through Simplified.com's REST API. Platform complexity is handled server-side — the CLI stays lean and focused.

Credential management: Authentication uses a single API key via the SIMPLIFIED_API_KEY environment variable — clean, scriptable, and CI/CD friendly:

export SIMPLIFIED_API_KEY=your_api_key_here
simplified accounts:list

Native fetch: We require Node.js 22+, so we use the built-in fetch — no external HTTP dependencies.

Rate limiting handled for you: Because all requests go through our API, platform-specific rate limits are managed server-side. You won't get a 429 from accidentally looping over a publish command.

What surprised us

The biggest surprise was how much demand there was for this in the AI agent community specifically. We thought our primary users would be developers building automation scripts — and they are — but the use case we didn't fully anticipate was AI agents that need to interact with social media as part of a larger autonomous workflow.

JSON-native output turned out to be the right call. Several users told us they chose Simplified CLI over alternatives specifically because of how easy it is to parse and chain.