asta-plugins

Show the user the agent's work on a research project and save iterations on the user's behalf. Scaffold rendering and deploy infrastructure (Quarto today, GitHub Pages, dev container), show the rendered output, save iterations. Doesn't handle research execution (use `asta-flows`).

Install or update the `asta` CLI to the version pinned by this plugin. Invoke whenever `asta` is not on PATH (e.g. `command not found` for `asta`) or when a subcommand/flag appears missing — that signals a stale install needing an update.

Converse with the user to identify the next most productive units of work for the current project, and record them in project.md under Pending Work. Use when the user wants to plan what to work on next, or when there is no project.md yet.

Execute the approved plan in work/<slug>/README.md (status ready), write outputs into work/<slug>/data/, record what happened in the Results section, then hand off to review-work. Use when there is a ready work item.

Write a detailed, executable plan for a single unit of work, then get it approved by review-plan. Updates work/<slug>/README.md with concrete instructions and sets status to ready (or needs-input if review repeatedly rejects).

Critic skill. Given a plan in work/<slug>/README.md (status pending-review), check that the steps are concrete, the tools are appropriate, and the plan is realistic. Write a verdict and feedback back into the README.

Critic skill. Given an executed work item (status pending-assessment), assess whether the Goal was actually accomplished. Identify the root cause when it was not (incorrect assumption, technical blocker, missing data). Updates work/<slug>/README.md Assessment section.

Router skill that advances the project autonomously. Examines project.md Pending Work, dispatches to do-work for ready items or plan-work otherwise, and loops until no actionable work remains. Use when the user says "keep going", "work on the project", "run the next step".

Persist completed work. For each work/<slug>/README.md with status done, move it from Pending to Completed in project.md, index the README in work/index.yaml via asta-documents, and commit the artifacts to git. Use after one or more work items finish.

Download PDFs for a list of academic papers identified by title, DOI, arXiv ID, or other paper IDs. Use when the user asks to "download these papers", "grab the PDFs", "fetch full text for this list", or supplies a list of citations and wants the source PDFs on disk. Resolves open-access PDFs automatically and drives a real browser (via Playwright, with a persistent profile) so the user can authenticate to paywalled publishers.

Report or fix a behavior gap in Asta skills. Use when an agent does the wrong thing, doesn't do what was asked, or lacks a capability that's wanted.

Summarize a research project conducted with Asta skills and submit it to the asta-research-challenge repository. Use when the user wants to reflect on a finished (or in-progress) project and/or share it with the Asta team. The user may say "reflect on this project", "submit my research challenge", or "write up what we did".

Plan and execute autonomous research as a graph of typed tasks tracked in beads. Use when working from a mission.md to drive multi-step research with explicit dependencies and structured outputs.

This skill should be used when the user asks to "analyze this dataset", "run datavoyager", "run data voyager", "explore this data", "what's in this CSV", "statistical analysis of", "find patterns in", or wants an AI-driven, code-executing analysis of a tabular dataset that answers a specific research question.

Use this skill to export and open A2A agent task outputs — "export the task results", "convert the task output to HTML", or work with the structured artifacts produced by an A2A agent task run.

Local document metadata index for files used by Asta skills and tools. Use this skill when the user asks to store a document "in Asta" or retrieve "from Asta". Use it when the user references an "Asta document" or anything with an `asta://` URI.

Create, configure, and monitor AutoDiscovery runs — either via the hosted service (`asta autodiscovery`) or via the local CLI (`asta-autodiscovery`). Use when the user asks about their runs, experiments, discoveries, wants to check status, or wants to start a new discovery run.

Run scientific (software) experiments. Use when the user asks to "run an experiment", "run an investigation", or "research with Asta." Also use this skill to analyze experimental data generate a research report from it. The user may refer to this system by its internal project name, "Panda."

This skill should be used when the user asks to "find papers", "search for papers", "what does the literature say", "find research on", "academic papers about", "literature review", "cite papers", or needs to answer questions using academic literature.

This skill should be used when the user asks to "generate theories", "theorize about", "what theories explain", "form scientific theories", "literature-driven theories", "hypothesize", "form hypotheses", "generate hypotheses", "what hypotheses explain", "run the theorizer", or wants AI-generated, literature-grounded scientific theories or hypotheses about a research question.

Create or update literature reviews/reports. Use whenever you need to research, summarize, or synthesize the literature.

Build a searchable Asta document index from a collection of local PDF files. Use when the user asks to "index these PDFs", "put these PDFs into an Asta index", "index these PDFs using Asta", "build a local paper index", "make these PDFs searchable", or "create an index from these papers".

Extract text from PDFs using olmOCR or remote OCR. Use when user asks to "extract text from PDF", "OCR a document", "read a PDF", or needs to process scanned documents.

Look up or search papers, authors, citations, and full-text snippets on Semantic Scholar. Use for fast, targeted queries about a paper, author, or specific named research artifact (benchmark, dataset, model, method, etc.) — not comprehensive reports.