Slax Reader CLI: a read-later library your AI agents can use — Slax ← Blog We shipped a CLI for Slax Reader, our read-later app. The interesting bit isn’t the CLI itself — it’s that your reading library is now a first-class tool that AI agents can call. Bookmark, list, and pipe-into-prompt are all scriptable.

Repo: github.com/slax-lab/slax-reader-cli (MIT). Install and usage below.

Why a CLI

Most AI agents have nowhere to put things.

Ask Claude Code to “save this article for later” — it can’t. ChatGPT can summarize a URL but can’t write the link anywhere you’ll find tomorrow. A browser agent scanning your timeline has no persistent store. Every conversation is fenced inside the tool it happened in.

The CLI fills that gap. Slax Reader becomes a persistent reading store that any agent — Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenClaw, Cursor, Windsurf — can read from and write to.

Concretely:

Browser agent scanning your X timeline → reader-cli add saves the links.

Claude Code drafting a piece → calls reader-cli list --filter inbox to pull today’s saves as source material.

Your weekend script pulls reader-cli list --filter archive --json from the last 30 days and feeds it into your own pipeline.

The library stops being a passive bookmark pile. It becomes a corpus your agents can work with.

What you can do with it

1. Filter, don’t summarize

Most “AI reads long articles for you” tools default to summarization. We think filtering is more useful.

Tell Claude Code: “Take the long piece I saved this morning, give me the 3 most counterintuitive points and 1 point I’d probably disagree with.”

Under the hood the agent runs reader-cli list --filter inbox --json, picks the right bookmark, then reader-cli get --markdown to pull the content. You never see the UUID.

You don’t need the article condensed. You need to know whether it’s worth your time, and which 5 minutes inside it matter.

2. Batch save by rule

reader-cli add takes URLs, but the interesting workflow is letting an agent do the picking:

“Scan the HN front page, save any post over 200 points in archive mode (full snapshot).”

“Watch my X timeline. Save links posted by the 8 accounts I save from most often.”

“Scan this Substack publication’s last 30 posts. Save anything with ‘agent’ in the title.”

This is scraping. The difference is you describe the rule in plain English instead of writing the scraper.

3. The RSS workflow, inverted

Traditional reader workflow:

Subscribe to N feeds.

RSS reader pulls everything.

You scan headlines.

You save things to read later.

You actually read them.

Step 3 — “scan the headlines yourself” — is the part that should belong to AI now.

Inverted:

Agent subscribes to feeds.

Agent scans, sends you a digest.

You point at the 3 worth reading.

Agent saves them to Reader.

A concrete example I run:

Open-source LLM release tracking. Agent scans HuggingFace trending, the release pages for Anthropic / Mistral / Meta / Qwen / DeepSeek, r/LocalLLaMA, and arxiv-sanity. Saves any new model card or benchmark worth reading, tagged models. Weekly digest.

After setting this up I dropped most of my RSS subscriptions. Not because they’re bad — because the scanning step shouldn’t be mine anymore.

4. Querying past-you

Every writer reinvents wheels. You read something last month that explained an idea clearly. You can’t find it now.

Before starting a piece, ask Claude Code: “In my Slax Reader archive, find everything about agent design patterns from the last 90 days.” The agent calls reader-cli list --filter archive --json, filters in its context, and returns a research brief from past-you. No re-reading the whole archive yourself.

Advanced: any time you read something that contradicts a view you currently hold, save it with #self-challenge. Once a quarter, read them back. That’s your opinions evolving, made queryable.

A few things about the product

For the skeptical:

Open source, self-hostable. Slax Reader itself is Apache 2.0 (github.com/slax-lab/slax-reader). The CLI is MIT. Export anytime.

Our cash flow is stable and we’re committed to running this long-term. Pocket was discontinued by Mozilla in 2025 and left a lot of people with read-later abandonment trauma. We won’t put you through that.

Permanent backup is free. Bookmarks + full-text cache, free forever. Readwise, Instapaper Premium, Matter, and former Pocket all charge for this. We don’t.

Full-text search and highlights are free. Same reasoning.

We continuously invest in platform-specific parsers. X, Threads, and Substack are well-supported. On the Chinese side we have dedicated parsers for WeChat Official Accounts, Xiaohongshu, Weibo, and Zhihu.

iOS, Android, web, browser extension.

Install

# One step: installs the CLI and the AI agent skill<br>npx @slax-lab/reader-cli@latest install

# Authenticate (paste API key from reader.slax.com → Settings → API Keys)<br>reader-cli login

# Use it<br>reader-cli add https://example.com --tags "models,ai"...