In a blog post, Reddit announced it is opening up a waitlist for its new developer platform, releasing a toolkit that they can soon pair with a directory of third-party software extensions to customize their communities and build better bots.

In a statement to TechCrunch, Reddit Chief Product Officer Pali Bhat said: “As we allow more UI customization, we expect Redditors and moderators to customize their communities to match their unique needs and tastes.”

The toolkit includes a studio for creating and testing automated tools on desktop, and will give developers more room to build through dedicated, reusable third-party tools. In their blog post, Reddit explains: “Currently, third-party developers on Reddit operate primarily with siloed resources for the communities they care about, utilizing limited resources and ad-hoc support. The Reddit Developer Platform will change all this. The platform will serve as an avenue for third-party developers to build meaningful Reddit extensions that our users will love.” 

The new developer platform is the latest in Reddit’s many investments in automation. In June, the company announced it would buy Spell, a platform for running machine learning experiments, and next month, Reddit announced plans to acquire MeaningCloud, a natural language processing company.

The developer platform will be made available to all developers next year.