reddit-pi product guide · Reviewed
How reddit-pi works: sources, AI, and data retention
Understand reddit-pi’s public archive sources, evidence review, AI limitations, three-day cache, and current data-retention behavior.
Independent public-history research
reddit-pi is an independent tool, not an official Reddit service. It retrieves available public posts and comments through the Arctic Shift archive API. Reddit share links may be resolved through Reddit to identify the linked item. Archive coverage and freshness vary; the tool cannot guarantee a complete history or retrieve private messages.
What the AI reviews
A scan fetches a bounded history and applies any selected subreddit scope before analysis. The pipeline screens items, reviews candidate evidence more deeply, and checks quotes against supplied text. Follow-up questions use batch evidence review and a final evidence-selection step before drafting a cited reply. Candidate review can use shortened text, so material outside the reviewed excerpt may be missed.
External AI processing
Analysis sends relevant public activity and your questions to the configured AI provider. The application supports DeepSeek, OpenRouter, and Anthropic; deployment configuration determines which is used. These services have their own processing policies. Do not enter confidential information in a question merely because the Reddit history itself is public.
Cache lifetime is not deletion
Completed reports can be reused for three days when the search scope and analysis contract match. After that interval the cache entry is no longer eligible for reuse. The current implementation does not automatically delete expired report rows or analysis checkpoints from its SQLite database. In-memory jobs and toxic-compilation caches can disappear when the server restarts. Hosting storage behavior may affect persistence.
Access and privacy limits
A job link contains an opaque identifier, not a login-protected account. Anyone with a working job identifier may be able to read that job through the API while it remains available. Analysis responses and job-resume pages request exclusion from search indexes; noindex is not an access-control mechanism. Server hosting and external providers may maintain operational logs.
Optional notifications
If you choose Notify me and allow browser notifications, the app stores the push subscription in server memory for that job. It removes the subscription when sending the terminal job alert. The notification uses generic text rather than naming the investigated account. Delivery is best-effort and subscriptions are not a durable queue across restarts.
Interpretation needs a reader
An exact textual match verifies that an excerpt exists in the supplied archive, not that a claim is true in the real world. Check authorship, dates, surrounding context, and the original source. Behavioral signals describe selected evidence, not medical diagnoses or reliable measurements of a person’s overall character. Do not use the tool to expose private identities or organize harassment.