CLI Anything Exa

Research

cli-anything-exa

CLI Anything Exa is an Agent Skill for research published in the HKUDS/CLI-Anything repository on GitHub: a SKILL.md instruction file an AI agent can load to do this task.

Agent-native CLI for Exa web search and content retrieval workflows.

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Inspect the Agent Skill at https://github.com/HKUDS/CLI-Anything/blob/HEAD/skills/cli-anything-exa/SKILL.md and all supporting files. Report provenance, permissions, scripts, dependencies, and security risks. Propose an exact installation into .agents/skills/cli-anything-exa, but wait for my approval before writing files or running scripts.

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Exa CLI Skill

Identity

Name: cli-anything-exa
Version: 1.0.0
Category: search
Entry Point: cli-anything-exa

What This CLI Does

Provides an agent-native command-line interface to the Exa API — a neural search engine optimised for AI agent workflows. Supports web search across multiple modes (fast, deep, deep-reasoning) and fetching full-text or highlighted page contents.

Prerequisites

Python >= 3.10
pip install cli-anything-exa
export EXA_API_KEY="your-api-key" (get one at https://dashboard.exa.ai/api-keys)

Installation

pip install git+https://github.com/HKUDS/CLI-Anything.git#subdirectory=exa/agent-harness

Command Reference

search — Web search

cli-anything-exa search "<query>" [OPTIONS]

Options:
  --type       auto|fast|instant|deep|deep-reasoning  (default: auto)
  --num-results / -n   1–100  (default: 10)
  --category   company|people|research-paper|news|personal-site|financial-report
  --content    highlights|text|summary|none  (default: highlights)
  --freshness  smart|always|never  (default: smart)
  --include-domains DOMAIN   (repeatable)
  --exclude-domains DOMAIN   (repeatable)
  --from DATE   ISO 8601 start published date
  --to   DATE   ISO 8601 end published date
  --location CC  Two-letter country code for geo-bias

contents — Fetch page contents

cli-anything-exa contents <url> [url ...] [--content text|highlights|summary] [--freshness smart|always|never]

server status — Verify API key and connectivity

cli-anything-exa server status

JSON Output

All commands support --json at the root level for machine-readable output:

cli-anything-exa --json search "latest LLM papers" --num-results 5

Common Agent Patterns

Fast keyword lookup

cli-anything-exa --json search "site:arxiv.org transformer architectures" --type fast --content highlights

Deep research on a topic

cli-anything-exa --json search "EU AI Act compliance requirements 2024" --type deep --content text

Academic paper discovery

cli-anything-exa --json search "retrieval augmented generation" --category research-paper --num-results 20

Company intelligence

cli-anything-exa --json search "Anthropic funding history" --category company

News monitoring

cli-anything-exa --json search "AI regulation news" --category news --from 2024-01-01

Fetch full content for summarisation

cli-anything-exa --json contents https://example.com/article --content text

Interactive REPL

cli-anything-exa   # No subcommand → enters REPL

Type commands without the cli-anything-exa prefix. Type exit or quit to leave.

Notes

highlights content mode is 10× more token-efficient than text — prefer it for agent pipelines
--type deep triggers multi-step reasoning; slower but synthesises across many sources
--category company and --category people do not support date or domain-exclude filters
Cost per query is included in JSON output under cost_dollars