Ask a question instead of reading the page
An agent that reads a whole article to find one sentence burns the context it needs for the actual work. Ask smry the question instead.what did they change about team pricing in this post? https://harbor.example/blog/pricing-update
search_article · 1 call · returned 3 passages, not the page
smry ranked every paragraph in the article against the question and returned
the three that answered it. ¶12 is that paragraph’s real position in the
piece, so your agent can quote it instead of paraphrasing from memory. The
whole page would have cost roughly ten times the tokens.
¶12 is a paragraph position, not a link. Quote it as plain text beside the
source URL. A URL with #p12 glued on will not resolve.Read the whole thing when you need it
Some work needs the article, not an answer: a translation, a rewrite, a close read. smry returns it as a window sized to a token budget, plus a marker for where it stopped. Hand the marker back and your agent continues from there.read this whole thing and give me a section-by-section outline
What smry can open
Everything on that list answers a question the same way an article does. The
format stops mattering once smry has the text. When a source is worth reading
every time it publishes, follow it rather than pasting its links one
by one.
A forty-page PDF you need one number from
Reading the PDF costs tens of thousands of tokens. Asking it a question costs hundreds.in this filing, what did they report for free cash flow? https://harbor.example/annual-report.pdf
search_article · 1 call · returned 1 passage from a 40-page file
A conference talk you do not have an hour for
Paste the YouTube link and ask. smry reads the transcript, so a forty-minute talk answers a question in one call.does the speaker in this talk say anything about hiring? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=example
A spreadsheet someone sent instead of a link
An.xlsx attachment, a CSV export, a slide deck. smry reads it from a URL, so
give it the link the file lives at. If the file is only on your disk, paste the
text into the prompt — every tool your agent has takes a URL or a string, never
raw bytes.
here is the csv. which rows have a renewal date before March?File bytes go in through the HTTP upload endpoint instead, which no agent tool calls. See Work with the library.
What cannot be read
smry does not get past a hard paywall, a sign-in wall, or a private network. That holds for sites you personally subscribe to. When a page cannot be read, smry returns an error naming the reason. It never returns partial text dressed up as the article, and never guesses at what the page said.Questions
How big a file can I hand it?
How big a file can I hand it?
100 MB is the upload ceiling. Anything smry has to parse for text tops out
at 25 MB, so a 40 MB PDF is rejected rather than half-read. Split it, or
give smry the source URL instead of the file.
Does reading a link save it?
Does reading a link save it?
No. Reading and saving are separate on purpose — an agent reads far more
than you want kept. When a page is worth keeping, ask for it explicitly.
See Keep what matters.
Can I trust what it gives back?
Can I trust what it gives back?
Every passage carries its paragraph anchor and its source URL, so you can
check any claim against the page. The text itself was written by whoever
published it, so treat it as source material rather than as instructions to
your agent.
What happens on a page that will not load?
What happens on a page that will not load?
You get an error that says which kind of failure it was: a bad or
unsupported URL, a publisher that timed out, or a budget you have spent.
A retry helps on the second; it never helps on the first.
Which agents can do this?
Which agents can do this?
Any client you have connected — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Claude Desktop,
or your own code. See Connect an agent.
How much can I read?
How much can I read?
A free account gets 60 operations a minute and 2,000 a day, of which 10 a
minute and 100 a day can be fresh extractions. A page smry has already read
comes from cache and costs no extraction. Paid plans raise the ceiling.
Next
Keep what matters
Save the pieces worth returning to, in a library only you can see.
Ask your library
Search everything you have kept, in one question.
Read a URL
The three read operations, their shapes, and their costs.