Using Reelwire from an AI assistant

Reelwire ships a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server: the same API, as tools an assistant can call, with this documentation bundled in beside them. It is a thin layer on purpose. Nothing underneath is different, and nothing is more permissive.

Everything you can do over the API you can do here. The server has a tool for every job a workspace key may do, one per job rather than one per route, so an assistant can set a workspace up from nothing, run it day to day, make a clip without publishing it, and answer questions about what went out, without anybody opening the dashboard.

Two addresses, one server. https://mcp.reelwire.io/mcp lists the everyday tools, about sixty: brands, channels, content, templates and videos, the media library, and posts from rendering to published. The rest (syndication, the compliance record and the audit log, custom feeds and events, the webhook and the delivery log, the team, and the rarer work on everything else) are a question away: the assistant asks reelwire_find_tools what else there is and runs it with reelwire_use_tool. Connect to https://mcp.reelwire.io/mcp/all instead to have every tool listed, about a hundred and twenty: it can do nothing /mcp cannot, it only lists more up front. A shorter list leaves an assistant more of its memory for your conversation, and it chooses better among fewer tools; some apps also take only so many (see Install it). Either way it lists only what your key may use.

Tested with six assistants: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity and Mistral. Each connects by signing in, with no key to copy, and Claude Code, Claude's command-line app, can take a key as well, which is worth knowing if the job is less "tell me what went out" and more "write the script that pushes our data in, then watch it arrive". Install it walks through each.

Page	What it is for
Install it	Connecting ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity or Mistral, step by step
Your first conversation	The three ways to set up (the quick setup, step by step, and changing what is there), with example answers and prompts, the plan table, and a whole first conversation
Every tool	All of them, grouped by permission, with the API route each one calls
Working with it	Worked examples and prompts: setting up, connecting your own data, writing posts, investigating, making a clip or several, and syndication

Start here

Three steps, and the assistant does the rest of the walking:

1. Connect your assistant to Reelwire: Install it has each of the six, and in every one it is a sign-in, no key to copy.
2. Say one sentence, such as "I'm new to Reelwire, set me up". The assistant calls reelwire_getting_started, the guided run, which reads what your workspace already holds.
3. Choose how you want to work. The quick setup does everything in one go from your website (or your profiles, a listing, a PDF or screenshots) and four answers, and stops twice for you to look; step by step asks one question at a time; changing what is there starts from what your workspace holds. Nothing is created or changed without your yes, and before a render is spent you see a free picture of the post in your own brand.

What the first conversation looks like

Your first conversation goes through every step with the answers that work, the plan table and a whole conversation as an example. In short:

The assistant first tells you in a few sentences what Reelwire is, and asks how you want to work: the quick setup, which reads your website or whatever else you give it, prepares your logo, makes your brand, animated background, outro and channel, plans two weeks to two months of posts and sets a frequency watch, stopping only for you to choose your brand's look and to approve the posts; step by step; or changing what is there, for a workspace that is set up already. Step by step, it offers a short article with pictures on how a finished video is put together (How a branded short video is put together). Then it finds out who you are by asking, one question at a time: whether you make short videos already and where you post them, whose name they go out in, whether marketing is your main job, and alone or in a team. From that it proposes one of three profiles for you to confirm, because everything after is fitted to it:

Who you are	What it asks you	What you have at the end
Yourself: a creator, coach, freelancer or expert	What you talk about and who follows you, where and how often you post, whether you want to appear in your videos, and what you already have (a logo, a handle, colours)	A personal brand with you as the presenter, one channel, four to eight weeks of posts, your own phone videos branded, and evergreen ready-made feeds (a quote, a fun fact or a question of the day) to fill the gaps if you want them
Your business: owner-run or a small team	What it does and where, its customers and accounts, whether a logo and design exist, its year (seasons, offers), how often to post, whether somebody else checks posts	Your brand built from your website or your old flyers and posts (or made with you), one channel, two or three months of posts about your business, ready-made feeds only where they suit your industry
An organisation: a marketing or communications team, or an agency for clients	Your role, who approves, your design guide, logo and font files, your brands, markets and languages, where posts go, your own systems, the rules every post keeps	A pilot: one brand from your guide (a brand per client for an agency), one or two channels that hold every post for approval, and four weeks of posts to show your approver

Before your brand is saved you see it, as free pictures of two or three directions when you have no design yet. Once it is yours, the assistant asks which of the stinger, the intro and the outro you want around your videos, recommending the outro, whether they play with music or without, and whether an animated background in your colours should move behind them, recommending that too, and makes and switches on what you chose. Then it offers to make your first real video with you, so you see one in your brand before anything is planned. Before the plan it asks what you want to post about: your own business, know-how of your trade or of general interest that it works out with you, and ready-made feeds between. Every clip is shown as a free picture first, with a Look change suggested where one would help. A post planned around a photo you have not taken yet is written all the same and waits for it: Reelwire emails you a few days before it is due while the photo is missing. It shows the plan as a table you approve, where your assistant draws one, and it remembers what you told it: come back a week later, in any assistant connected to the workspace, and it greets you and carries on.

Whoever you are, the plan respects three things: as many posts as your month's videos pay for (every channel a post goes to renders it once), never more a day than suits a new account (one a day in its first week, two in weeks two and three, three from week four), and only between 06:00 and 20:00 where your audience lives. If none of the styles you are shown is yours, the assistant asks whether you would like a design made especially for you, and sends Reelwire the request on your yes.

Starter prompts

Paste one and change the words in it to yours. They say what you want, not which tool to use: choosing the tool is the assistant's job.

To	Say
Begin, whoever you are	I'm new to Reelwire. Tell me what it can do for me, then set me up one step at a time and ask before creating anything.
Get there fast	Set everything up for me. Here's our website. Four weeks of posts, three a week, and send them to me by email.
Change what is there	My workspace is set up. Tell me what it holds, then help me change my schedule.
Post as yourself	I'm a fitness coach on Instagram and TikTok. Help me make a personal brand with me in the videos and plan my posts for the next six weeks.
Set up a business	I run a car repair workshop. Here's my website. Build my brand from it and plan my posts for the next three months.
Run a pilot for a team	I'm in the marketing team of a bank. Set up a pilot for our retail brand from our design guide, with every post approved before it goes out.
Plan ahead	Plan my next twelve weeks of posts, three a week, and show me every post before you write it.
Choose what wraps your videos	Show me what a stinger, an intro and an outro would look like in my brand, then help me choose, with music or without.
Bring your videos to life	Make an animated background in our colours for behind every clip. Show me three first.
Come back later	Where did we stop last time? Plan the next weeks the same way.
Brand your own video	I filmed a job on my phone. Put my logo and a title on it and add captions.
Make one video to download	Make me one video about our opening hours over the holidays, nothing published.
See what happened	What went out this week, what is waiting for approval, and did anything fail?

Ready-made prompts

Clients that show MCP prompts list twelve beside the server, each a whole conversation picked by hand: Get started with Reelwire, Set everything up for me, Change my schedule, brand, channels or pocket, Plan my next months of posts, Set up Reelwire for our team, Export one video, Make my brand complete, Make a stinger, intro or outro for a brand, Suggest ready-made feeds for my channels, Write a post for a channel, What went out, and what is stuck and Hand your posts on to your participants. Working with it shows what each conversation does.

What you can do with it

• Set up a brand from your website, your design guide or a conversation, and see it on a free picture.
• Plan weeks or months of posts and write them all at once, then change, move or cancel any of them.
• Put your brand on your own photos and phone videos.
• Make a single video to download, in every shape and language you need.
• Add ready-made feeds that post on their own where they suit your industry.
• Ask what went out, what waits for approval, and why something did not arrive.
• On Enterprise: the compliance record, syndication to partners, and planned silences.

The security model is the key

Every request the server makes acts as one ordinary API key: the one you gave your assistant, or the one Reelwire made for it when you connected by signing in. No session, no admin credential, no way to mint one. Whatever the key may do, the assistant may do; whatever it may not, neither may the assistant.

That makes the interesting decision a one-line one: give the assistant a key with the permissions you would give a colleague doing that job.

What you want	The key to give it
Answer questions about what is going out, and why something failed	Read only
Draft and schedule posts for a person to approve	Make and hand over posts: Posts, Post composer, Media and Clip studio - Create clip, with Clip studio, Brands and Channels read
Run a producer: push events in	Send raw data: Custom feeds - Send raw data
Answer an auditor's questions from the compliance record and the audit log (Enterprise), with reelwire_compliance	Compliance, read
Set a whole workspace up and run it	Run the whole workspace

Make and hand over posts, Send raw data, Read only and Run the whole workspace are the ready-made sets listed under Permissions; on the API keys screen you tick the same boxes yourself.

Two permissions are yours to give only if you hold them yourself: Posts - Approvals: write needs the Approvals permission, and Plan: read, which shows the prices and the next invoice, is the owner's. A ready-made set leaves out whichever of them you may not give.

Connecting by signing in asks the same question in fewer words: reading only, which is the Read only set, or reading and acting, which is Run the whole workspace without the team and the webhook address, and without approving posts unless you switch that on too. An assistant connected that way never invites a colleague or points your hand-overs somewhere else: those are for a person, or a key made by hand for a script that needs them. Its key also works only through Reelwire's MCP server: the same token sent to the API from anywhere else is refused, so a connection that leaks out of the assistant is no use to whoever finds it.

A refusal comes back to the assistant as a fact it can report, naming the permission that is missing and where to widen it, rather than as an error it will retry the same way.

Every tool says what it does to the world, in the marks MCP defines: whether it only reads, whether it changes or removes something, and whether it reaches outside your workspace (an email, a webhook, a platform). Your app uses them to decide when to ask you first: ChatGPT asks before anything that is not a read, and Claude warns before anything that removes or overwrites. And where a tool's answer carries words from outside your workspace, a receiver's reply or what a syndication participant typed, they arrive marked as such, so the assistant reports them rather than taking them as instructions.

What is worth telling your assistant

Start with the guided run. reelwire_getting_started is the shortest way from an empty workspace to its first months of posts, fitted to who you are (Start here has the whole walk). It reads what your workspace already holds and answers with one thing: either a question to put to you, or the next step to take. So the conversation goes question, answer, question, rather than the assistant deciding on your behalf and presenting you with a workspace. If yours launches into making things unasked, say "use the getting started tool and ask me one question at a time".

Let it show you what it renders. A clip cannot come back as a tool result, so how you see it depends on the client. In Claude and ChatGPT a small player appears under the answer and plays the clip when the render is done. Elsewhere the assistant hands you a download link to click. When the server runs on your own machine, the file is written to your disk: ask the assistant to open it in your own browser, the one your machine opens links with, not its built-in browser or preview pane. That is not fussiness. A post's download is a page that plays the video sitting beside it on disk with nothing loaded from the network, so a sandboxed viewer draws an empty player, and an empty player looks exactly like a render that went wrong.

Validate before sending. reelwire_validate_content checks a clip's or a post's content against the template it would draw, and reelwire_validate_event and reelwire_validate_feed_event check an event before it is sent. They cost nothing, store nothing and refuse for the same reasons the real render or send would, naming each field at fault and what is wrong with it. An assistant that validates first gets the field name it got wrong instead of spending a render, or sending something malformed out on every channel you have.

An assistant works in UTC. "Thursday at nine" has to become an ISO 8601 UTC instant before it reaches reelwire_schedule_post, because a key is answered in UTC. The workspace's own screens show the same instant in each person's own time zone.

Tell it who posts. Reelwire hands each post over when it is due, by email, by webhook or both, for you, your own system or a posting service to post; it posts on the platform itself only for a channel whose platform connector is switched on. Once a post is up, reelwire_report_post records it with its link, which is how the Posts screen learns what happened.

What it deliberately cannot do

No tool creates, revokes or shows again an API key, rotates or shows the webhook signing secret, changes the plan, buys allowance, touches invoices, the billing address or your commission, leaves the workspace, signs anybody in, or reaches another workspace.

That is not restraint in the tool layer, which an assistant could be talked out of by something it reads. The API refuses those paths to every key, whatever it holds, so the limit holds even if somebody writes their own client. Money, credentials and the account itself are for a person who signed in.

A connection you signed in to has you behind it. For a few things it acts as you, with your role and your permissions, where a key made by hand is refused: your own name, language, time zone and optional emails, the workspace's industries, name and storage split if you are its owner (all with reelwire_my_account), and connecting or disconnecting a platform account if you hold Administration (below).

One permission reaches people. A key with Team: write can invite colleagues and give them permissions, including Administration, which can make keys. It is there so a workspace can be set up entirely by a key made for the job; an assistant connected by signing in never holds it.

Three things the API allows and the tools do differently:

• Uploading a file. A tool call is text, so an assistant cannot pass a picture it can see straight into one. Instead it asks for a one-time upload link (reelwire_media_upload_link): in Claude, ChatGPT and other apps that show MCP Apps, a drop zone appears in the conversation where you drop your files, and the assistant is told what arrived; elsewhere it sends the file to the link from its own code sandbox. It can also bring a file in from a web address (reelwire_import_media), or send you to the Media screen to upload it yourself. Then it points a brand at it with reelwire_set_brand_asset, or uses it in a clip. What it wrote itself, such as an SVG logo it drew, it sends directly, with content on either of those two tools.
• A channel's platform connector. Its credentials are a platform's secrets, and no tool takes them, so they never pass through the conversation. They are entered by a person with the Administration permission, in the channel's dialogue on the Channels screen, under Handed over by platform connector. Once they are saved, reelwire_update_channel can switch the connector on or off (deliverByConnector). On a platform connected by signing in, such as Instagram or TikTok, an assistant you connected by signing in can start it: reelwire_update_channel with connect gives you a link, you sign in on the platform yourself, and connectId keeps the account on the channel; connectSameAs uses an account another channel is connected to already, with no new sign-in and counted once; disconnect takes it off again. All three need the Administration permission.
• Several exports in one zip. reelwire_download_export hands over one finished export as its own .mp4, and several as one zip with jobIds, as a link that works for fifteen minutes.

Everything else a key may do has a tool. If you find a route with no tool for it, that is a gap worth telling us about.