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

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 w