Bees runs its own social accounts

Launch posts say what a tool can do. This one shows a process we actually run, with the real numbers and the parts that went wrong.

Bees has brand accounts on Bluesky, dev.to, Substack, a few forums and a long list of directories. Keeping up with all of them by hand is the kind of work that slips. So on 7 October we gave it to a Bees process.

How it was built

We typed the outcome into Ask Bees: check every place Bees has an account, answer anyone who replied to us, then join a few relevant conversations, as the Bees account and within a daily limit.

Bees proposed a process with three agents and four stages:

1. Check sites. A site checker opens each of the 30 places as the Bees account. It notes where it is signed in, who is owed a reply and how many actions are left for the day.
2. Engage. A poster answers replies first. Then it spends what is left of the daily allowance on likes, comments and answers to questions.
3. Audit log. A separate reviewer reopens every action from the public page, not from the poster's own log.
4. Done.

The agents get a browser, developer tools and a web fetcher. A schedule starts a fresh run at 9:00 and 18:00 Kathmandu time.

The rules went into the goal and the agent instructions, not into code:

• At most 5 actions per site per day, shared by both runs.
• Directories and listings are only watched. On Reddit, LinkedIn and Hacker News it never posts; it logs what it saw for a person.
• Claims about Bees come only from a short facts file, and most replies carry no link.
• Every site gets one log line per run, even when the answer is "nothing worth answering".

What the first runs did

7 October, first run, 27 minutes. It made 12 public actions across Bluesky, dev.to and Substack: likes on posts about local agents and agent security, and one comment on dev.to that said we work on Bees. It also reported what it could not do. Bluesky wanted the account email verified before Bees could reply, and Hashnode had removed our three posts. It did not send the verification email or file an appeal on its own. It left both for us.

8 October, the reviewer sent it back. The poster skipped Substack with "not reached in this run". The reviewer said that is not a reason to skip a signed-in site, and listed exactly what to do: open Substack, answer anything owed, find an on-topic thread or write down why there was none. The poster went back, did it, and the second review passed. The whole run took 49 minutes.

8 October evening, a cheaper model, 22 minutes, no human touch. We moved the agents to DeepSeek V4 Flash. The run went from start to Done with zero clicks from us. The reviewer's notes are the part we trust most. It checked that our Bluesky like was the only one on the post, and that the reply text matched the log word for word. It also said what it could not check: Substack does not show who liked a note, so two likes rest on the poster's word.

What went wrong

• Not every model got through. Before that clean run we made three other attempts the same evening. One, on DeepSeek V4 Pro, failed at the first stage on a provider error. We stopped the other two ourselves.
• Some sites stop agents at the door. Two forums sit behind bot checks, one site has no profile page for the account, and two had signed out. The checker logs those as skipped with the reason, and the run carries on.
• It only runs while Bees is open. Agents run on our own computer, not on a server. The run due on the morning of 9 October is still waiting, because Bees has been closed through launch week. That is the trade we chose, and we wrote up why.

If you build one

• Put the hard limits in the goal: where it may post, how many actions a day, which facts it may use.
• Keep a review stage that checks the live pages, not the worker's summary. Ours caught a skipped site the worker had called done.
• Leave account decisions to a person: verifying an email, appealing a removal, anything that changes the account itself.

The process started as a short request in Ask Bees, then took a few rounds of tightening the rules. If you have a chore like this, describe the outcome and read what Bees proposes. Download Bees, or read how the reviewer works.

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First published on the Bees blog: https://bees.bot/blog/bees-runs-its-own-social-accounts

Bees is free and open source: https://github.com/Bees-bot/bees-desktop