Run your Instagram with Claude: the free Instagram Agent skill

The Instagram Agent skill is a free pack of 13 Claude skills. Together they cover the work a social media manager does on Instagram. It finds what's working in your niche, writes your reels, captions, carousels and stories, scores your profile, plans your week and drafts your comments, replies and DMs. You review everything and post it yourself.

It's made by Jake Schincariol, it's on GitHub, and it's MIT licensed. That means it's free to use, change and share. There's no signup and no API key.

🤔 Why it's worth setting up

Most "AI for Instagram" setups are one big prompt that spits out generic captions. This is different in four ways.

1. Each job has its own skill. The reel writer only writes reels. The caption writer only writes captions. Each one has its own rules, so you get much sharper output than a do-everything prompt.
2. Some of it actually runs code. Five small Python tools run on your computer. They score your hooks, time your script to the second, show you exactly what your caption looks like before the "... more" cut, and strip AI tells out of your writing. These are real checks, not Claude guessing.
3. It learns your voice. Every skill reads one file about you: who you talk to, how you sound on camera, and the words you'd never say. You have to say your scripts out loud, so this matters more on Instagram than anywhere else.
4. It's honest about its limits. The creator tested the hook scorer against real data and published the results, including the parts that didn't work. I've summarised them below.

🧠 What all 13 skills do

You run each one by typing its command in Claude, like /ig-reel. You can also just ask in plain English ("write me a reel about X") and Claude picks the right skill.

Research: find out what's working

Why "beat their normal views" matters: an account with 2 million followers getting 400,000 views had a quiet day. An account with 4,000 followers getting 400,000 views found something you can learn from. /ig-viral only cares about the second kind.

Create: write the content

Grow: plan and engage

Quality control

⚖️ What it can and can't do

What it does well

• Kills weak hooks before you film them. The creator tested the hook scorer on 74 real short-form hooks. It reliably caught bad ones: 9 out of 10 deliberately weak hooks scored below average. If your hook opens with "Hey guys" or "Stop scrolling", it'll tell you.
• Times your script. It flags a hook that runs past 3 seconds, any line long enough for people to swipe away, and a script with no loop back to the start.
• Gives you real structure. 26 hook formulas, a 100-point profile checklist and 9 comment types. These are frameworks you can learn from, not just output.
• Cleans up AI writing. It removes the obvious tells so your captions don't read like ChatGPT.
• Never makes things up. If a script needs a number you haven't given it, it leaves {{your number}} in the draft and flags it. It won't invent results or clients under your name.

What it can't do

• It can't post, schedule, comment or DM for you. Every skill ends with copy-ready text. You paste it into Instagram. Automating posting, commenting or DMs through browser bots breaks Instagram's terms and gets accounts blocked.
• It can't pick your winners. The same test found the hook scorer was barely better than a coin flip at telling a creator's hits from their misses. It can tell you a hook is bad. It can't tell you which of two good hooks will go viral. That comes down to your delivery, your edit, your audio and who Instagram shows it to.
• It can't pull your analytics automatically. /ig-audit works off screenshots or numbers you paste from Instagram Insights.
• It can't scrape Instagram. /ig-viral reads about 10 accounts and a dozen reels each, at human speed, in your own browser. If Claude can't browse, you paste the numbers in yourself. It's a bit of manual work, and it's deliberately kept small.
• It can't film or edit your videos. It writes scripts and on-screen text. For editing, see my guide on editing videos with Claude Code.
• It doesn't promise "undetectable". The humaniser's AI checks run on your computer. They're not GPTZero or Originality, and nobody can honestly guarantee you'll pass those.
• Platform rules change. Things like the hashtag limit move. If the skill says one thing and Instagram is doing another, Instagram is right.

✅ Before you start

🛠 Step 1: Install the skills

The easy way is to let Claude do it. Open Claude Code and paste this:

Prompt 1: Install

https://github.com/Jakeschincariol/instagram-agent-skill

Install all 13 skills from this repo globally so I can use them in any project. Copy every skills/ig-* folder into ~/.claude/skills/. Make sure Python 3 is installed, and install it for my operating system if it isn't.

When you're done, list the 13 commands and confirm /ig-reel and /ig-human can run their Python tools.

If you'd rather do it yourself, run these two commands in your terminal:

git clone https://github.com/Jakeschincariol/instagram-agent-skill.git
cp -r instagram-agent-skill/skills/ig-* ~/.claude/skills/

Or install it as a plugin from inside Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add Jakeschincariol/instagram-agent-skill
/plugin install instagram-agent

🗣 Step 2: Teach it your voice

This is the most important step. Don't skip it. Every skill reads a file called voice.md, and a script in the wrong voice is useless because you have to say it on camera.

Grab 3 of your own reels or captions that sound the most like you. Paste their scripts or captions in with this prompt:

Prompt 2: Write my voice file

Write my voice.md for the Instagram Agent skills from the 3 examples below. Use the template in the instagram-agent-skill repo (templates/voice.md) and save it to ~/.claude/instagram/voice.md.

About me:
- Name and handle: [YOUR NAME, @HANDLE]
- What I do in one sentence: [WHAT YOU DO]
- Who I'm talking to (be specific): [E.G. "PHOTOGRAPHERS CHARGING UNDER $2,000", NOT "CREATIVES"]
- What I sell: [YOUR OFFER]
- Do I swear: [YES / MILD / NO]

My 3 examples:
1. [PASTE SCRIPT OR CAPTION]
2. [PASTE SCRIPT OR CAPTION]
3. [PASTE SCRIPT OR CAPTION]

Show me the file before you save it and ask me about anything you're unsure of, especially words I would never say out loud.

📊 Step 3: Score your profile

Start here because it's quick and it fixes the page every new viewer lands on. Take a screenshot of the top of your Instagram profile plus the first two rows of your grid.

Prompt 3: Profile score

/ig-profile

Here's my profile [ATTACH SCREENSHOT]. My link goes to [WHERE YOUR LINK GOES]. My highlights are called [HIGHLIGHT NAMES] and I have [WHAT'S PINNED, OR "NOTHING"] pinned.

Score it out of 100, then give me the rewrites in fix-first order.

Expect a low score. Most profiles land in the 30s and 40s the first time. The biggest wins are usually the name field (the bold line under your photo, which is what Instagram search reads) and pinning 3 posts.

🔍 Step 4: Find what's going viral in your niche

/ig-viral asks for 6 to 12 accounts to study:

• 4 direct: same niche, a bit ahead of you
• 4 adjacent: different niche, same audience. This is where you find formats before your niche catches on.
• 2 to 4 big accounts: for format ideas only

Pick accounts within about 10x your follower count. A format that works at 2 million followers often only works because it's at 2 million followers.

Prompt 4: Build my swipe file

/ig-viral

My niche is [YOUR NICHE] and I have about [YOUR FOLLOWER COUNT] followers. Here are the accounts I want to study:
[@ACCOUNT 1]
[@ACCOUNT 2]
[@ACCOUNT 3]
...

Read their last 12 reels at a normal pace, rank them by how far each beat its own account's median views, and save the swipe file. Tell me which hook formulas are over-performing.

📅 Step 5: Plan your week

Prompt 5: Weekly plan

/ig-plan

Plan my week. Here's what actually happened this week that I could post about:
- [A CLIENT WIN, A NUMBER, A MISTAKE, SOMETHING YOU BUILT, AN OPINION]
- [ANOTHER ONE]
- [ANOTHER ONE]

The 3 or 4 themes I want to be known for are [THEMES].

It gives you 4 to 5 posts (at least 3 reels), a mix of proof, teaching, opinion, story and offer posts, and your list of 10 accounts to engage with.

🎬 Step 6: Write the reel and caption

Say "write Tuesday" after the plan, or start from any idea:

Prompt 6: Reel script

/ig-reel

Make a reel about [YOUR IDEA]. The one specific true thing behind it is [WHAT HAPPENED, TO WHO, AND WHAT IT COST OR MADE]. Aim for about [30] seconds.

You'll get 3 scored hooks, the script on the best one, separate on-screen text, a timed beat sheet and a humaniser score. If the best hook scores under 50, it'll tell you that you don't have a hook yet. Then:

Prompt 7: Caption

/ig-caption

Write the caption for that reel. The keyword I want people to comment is [KEYWORD]. The phrases I want to be found for in search are [PHRASE 1] and [PHRASE 2].

Film it, paste the caption, post. Then reply "yes" to the reel skill so it logs what you posted.

🔁 Your weekly routine

Once it's set up, here's how to fit it into a normal week.

💡 How to get the most out of it

1. Spend real time on your voice file. It's the difference between scripts you film and scripts you rewrite. Update it whenever a script makes you cringe.
2. Always give it one specific true thing. A number, a client, a mistake, a result. The skills are built to ask for this, and they won't make it up.
3. Use the hook scorer to cut, not to choose. Bin anything that scores low. Between two strong hooks, trust your gut and your retention graph.
4. Check your 3-second hold in Insights. /ig-audit treats it as your hook's grade. If people leave in the first 3 seconds, fix the hook before anything else.
5. Views but no follows is a profile problem. No views is a hook problem. Run /ig-profile for the first, /ig-reel for the second.
6. Edit the AI word list. If the humaniser strips a word you genuinely use, remove it from slop.json in the ig-human folder.
7. Reply to good questions with a reel. /ig-reply flags them. The person gets notified and the hook is already written.
8. Use keyword DMs through Instagram's own tools. Auto-replies to people who comment a keyword are allowed through Instagram's built-in features and approved partners. /ig-dm writes the message. Bulk cold DMs are not allowed.

🧯 Troubleshooting