skills/hugging-face-tool-builder/SKILL.md
Use this skill when the user wants to build tool/scripts or achieve a task where using data from the Hugging Face API would help. This is especially useful when chaining or combining API calls or the task will be repeated/automated. This Skill creates a reusable script to fetch, enrich or process data.
npx skillsauth add huggingface/skills hugging-face-tool-builderInstall this skill globally with one command. Works with Claude Code, Cursor, and Windsurf.
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Your purpose is now is to create reusable command line scripts and utilities for using the Hugging Face API, allowing chaining, piping and intermediate processing where helpful. You can access the API directly, as well as use the hf command line tool. Model and Dataset cards can be accessed from repositories directly.
Make sure to follow these rules:
--help command line argument to describe their inputs and outputsHF_TOKEN environment variable as an Authorization header. For example: curl -H "Authorization: Bearer ${HF_TOKEN}" https://huggingface.co/api/. This provides higher rate limits and appropriate authorization for data access.Be sure to confirm User preferences where there are questions or clarifications needed.
Paths below are relative to this skill directory.
Reference examples:
references/hf_model_papers_auth.sh — uses HF_TOKEN automatically and chains trending → model metadata → model card parsing with fallbacks; it demonstrates multi-step API usage plus auth hygiene for gated/private content.references/find_models_by_paper.sh — optional HF_TOKEN usage via --token, consistent authenticated search, and a retry path when arXiv-prefixed searches are too narrow; it shows resilient query strategy and clear user-facing help.references/hf_model_card_frontmatter.sh — uses the hf CLI to download model cards, extracts YAML frontmatter, and emits NDJSON summaries (license, pipeline tag, tags, gated prompt flag) for easy filtering.Baseline examples (ultra-simple, minimal logic, raw JSON output with HF_TOKEN header):
references/baseline_hf_api.sh — bashreferences/baseline_hf_api.py — pythonreferences/baseline_hf_api.tsx — typescript executableComposable utility (stdin → NDJSON):
references/hf_enrich_models.sh — reads model IDs from stdin, fetches metadata per ID, emits one JSON object per line for streaming pipelines.Composability through piping (shell-friendly JSON output):
references/baseline_hf_api.sh 25 | jq -r '.[].id' | references/hf_enrich_models.sh | jq -s 'sort_by(.downloads) | reverse | .[:10]'references/baseline_hf_api.sh 50 | jq '[.[] | {id, downloads}] | sort_by(.downloads) | reverse | .[:10]'printf '%s\n' openai/gpt-oss-120b meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-8B | references/hf_model_card_frontmatter.sh | jq -s 'map({id, license, has_extra_gated_prompt})'The following are the main API endpoints available at https://huggingface.co
/api/datasets
/api/models
/api/spaces
/api/collections
/api/daily_papers
/api/notifications
/api/settings
/api/whoami-v2
/api/trending
/oauth/userinfo
The API is documented with the OpenAPI standard at https://huggingface.co/.well-known/openapi.json.
IMPORTANT: DO NOT ATTEMPT to read https://huggingface.co/.well-known/openapi.json directly as it is too large to process.
IMPORTANT Use jq to query and extract relevant parts. For example,
Command to Get All 160 Endpoints
curl -s "https://huggingface.co/.well-known/openapi.json" | jq '.paths | keys | sort'
Model Search Endpoint Details
curl -s "https://huggingface.co/.well-known/openapi.json" | jq '.paths["/api/models"]'
You can also query endpoints to see the shape of the data. When doing so constrain results to low numbers to make them easy to process, yet representative.
The hf command line tool gives you further access to Hugging Face repository content and infrastructure.
❯ hf --help
Usage: hf [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...
Hugging Face Hub CLI
Options:
--help Show this message and exit.
Commands:
auth Manage authentication (login, logout, etc.).
cache Manage local cache directory.
download Download files from the Hub.
endpoints Manage Hugging Face Inference Endpoints.
env Print information about the environment.
jobs Run and manage Jobs on the Hub.
repo Manage repos on the Hub.
repo-files Manage files in a repo on the Hub.
upload Upload a file or a folder to the Hub.
upload-large-folder Upload a large folder to the Hub.
version Print information about the hf version.
The hf CLI command has replaced the now deprecated huggingface_hub CLI command.
tools
Hugging Face Hub CLI (`hf`) for downloading, uploading, and managing models, datasets, spaces, buckets, repos, papers, jobs, and more on the Hugging Face Hub. Use when: handling authentication; managing local cache; managing Hugging Face Buckets; running or scheduling jobs on Hugging Face infrastructure; managing Hugging Face repos; discussions and pull requests; browsing models, datasets and spaces; reading, searching, or browsing academic papers; managing collections; querying datasets; configuring spaces; setting up webhooks; or deploying and managing HF Inference Endpoints. Make sure to use this skill whenever the user mentions 'hf', 'huggingface', 'Hugging Face', 'huggingface-cli', or 'hugging face cli', or wants to do anything related to the Hugging Face ecosystem and to AI and ML in general. Also use for cloud storage needs like training checkpoints, data pipelines, or agent traces. Use even if the user doesn't explicitly ask for a CLI command. Replaces the deprecated `huggingface-cli`.
development
AI demos and GPU compute with Gradio Spaces and Hugging Face Spaces ZeroGPU. Use when writing or reviewing code that uses `@spaces.GPU`, configuring `python_version` or `requirements.txt` for a ZeroGPU Space, or handling ZeroGPU-specific code constraints — pickle-based process isolation, `gr.State` semantics across the worker boundary, no `torch.compile` (use AoTI instead), CUDA wheel-only builds (no `nvcc` at build or runtime), large vs xlarge sizing, and dynamic duration callables. Make sure to use this skill whenever the user mentions ZeroGPU, `@spaces.GPU`, or the `spaces` Python package, or hits ZeroGPU-specific code errors like `PicklingError` across the worker boundary, `illegal duration`, or `flash-attn` wheel-build failures — even when the user does not explicitly ask for ZeroGPU coding guidance. Trigger on `import spaces` or `@spaces.GPU` in code.
development
Train or fine-tune sentence-transformers models across `SentenceTransformer` (bi-encoder; dense or static embedding model; for retrieval, similarity, clustering, classification, paraphrase mining, dedup, multimodal), `CrossEncoder` (reranker; pair scoring for two-stage retrieval / pair classification), and `SparseEncoder` (SPLADE, sparse embedding model; for learned-sparse retrieval). Covers loss selection, hard-negative mining, evaluators, distillation, LoRA, Matryoshka, and Hugging Face Hub publishing. Use for any sentence-transformers training task.
development
Use this skill for Hugging Face Dataset Viewer API workflows that fetch subset/split metadata, paginate rows, search text, apply filters, download parquet URLs, and read size or statistics.