Agent Skills

Agent skills are machine-readable instructions that teach coding agents — Claude Code and any other agent that reads the shared ~/.agents/skills directory — how to use the Hotdata CLI on your behalf. Once installed, your agent can list workspaces, run queries, create instant databases, and manage ingest sources without you copying commands by hand.

Claude Code integration (YouTube):

Install

Skills ship inside hotdata-cli. The CLI installer sets them up for you:

curl -fsSL https://hotdata.dev/install | sh

That installs the CLI (through Homebrew when brew is present) and then the skill. To install or refresh the skill on its own, for example for a CLI installed another way:

hotdata manage skills install

Either path installs the skill into ~/.agents/skills/hotdata and links it into each detected agent directory (~/.claude, ~/.pi). Pass --project to install into the current project directory instead. Check which skills are present:

hotdata manage skills status

How it works

Skills are structured Markdown files (under skills/hotdata in the CLI repo) that describe:

What the CLI can do — commands, flags, and expected output
When to use each command — context and preconditions
How to chain commands — multi-step workflows like create → load → query

The agent discovers these files in its skills directory and uses them to decide which hotdata commands to run in response to your natural-language requests. One top-level hotdata skill registers with the agent; specialized guides for search, analytics, and geospatial work are bundled inside it and loaded on demand.

You stay in control: the CLI and API rules still apply. The skill teaches the agent how to call them — it does not grant any new permissions.

Example: ask your agent to query data

After installation, open Claude Code (or another supported agent) in a project and ask:

List my workspaces, then run SELECT COUNT(*) FROM default.public.orders
using the mydb instant database.

The agent will:

Run hotdata workspaces list to find the active workspace
Run hotdata databases list to resolve mydb to its database id
Run hotdata query "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM default.public.orders" --database <database_id>
Return the result inline in the chat

Supported agents

Agent	Supported
Claude Code	yes
pi	yes
Other agents that read `~/.agents/skills`	yes

Configuration

Skills use your existing login and workspace config at ~/.hotdata/config.yml. No additional setup is needed after hotdata auth login and hotdata workspaces use.