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Skills Overview ​

Here, “skills” means skills/zot-skills/SKILL.md.

It is not a second CLI tutorial. It is the Zotero workflow contract for Claude Code, Codex, and similar agents.

If your goal is to:

  • find items in Zotero
  • pull PDF text, annotations, notes, or child items
  • build a long-lived workspace
  • save a search
  • download attachments
  • update the library safely

start from the skill, not the command list.

Read this before the CLI pages ​

Recommended order:

  1. Agent Usage
  2. Routing
  3. Safety
  4. Workflows
  5. If you used one of the reference CLIs before, read Migrating from ref\zotero-cli or Migrating from ref\zotagent
  6. Only then, if needed, CLI Overview

What the skill treats as first-class ​

  • Item metadata: title, creators, year, item type, citation, child items
  • Evidence: PDF full text, outline, annotations, notes
  • Organization: tags, collections, libraries, feeds, saved searches
  • Working sets: workspaces, semantic indexing, semantic query/search
  • Configuration and troubleshooting: doctor, config, profiles
  • Controlled writes: notes, tags, collections, imports, duplicate merge, publication-status sync

How the agent should think about it ​

The skill decides four things first:

  1. what Zotero content the user actually wants
  2. whether the task is read-only or mutating
  3. whether doctor should run first
  4. whether the reply should return results, evidence, boundaries, or a failure reason

From the user side, the right move is not:

  • “Which command should I run?”

It is:

  • “Find papers in my Zotero library about …”
  • “Pull the annotations and notes for this item”
  • “Create a workspace and make it ready for Q&A”
  • “Show me the current config and default profile first”

When this skill should not trigger ​

By default, do not use it for:

  • generic literature search
  • ordinary paper summarization
  • bibliography-format teaching
  • PDF work that does not depend on Zotero or a local workspace

Those requests do not treat Zotero as the primary content source.

  • Main skill file: skills/zot-skills/SKILL.md
  • Regression prompts: skills/zot-skills/test-prompts.json
  • Eval set: skills/zot-skills/evals/evals.json