Agent skill · writing content · jeremylongshore
exa-known-pitfalls
Audit an Exa integration for stale search types, unsafe secrets, ignored partial failures, unbounded content work, weak citations, and orphaned asynchronous resources. Use when operating or reviewing this Exa boundary. Trigger with "Exa known pitfalls", "review Exa known pitfalls", or "fix Exa known pitfalls".
Why this skill is useful
Provides specific integration patterns and common pitfalls for using Exa's API that the AI wouldn't reliably generate on its own.
What it needs
Requires exa account access. About 3k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-07. 2,604 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
Exa Integration Pitfall Review Overview Audit an Exa integration for stale search types, unsafe secrets, ignored partial failures, unbounded content work, weak citations, and orphaned asynchronous resources. Treat credentials, queries, retrieved content, generated output, spend, and destructive state as separately governed boundaries. Prerequisites The target repository, environment, Exa team, product surface, and accountable owner. The workload's data classification, latency and freshness promise, cost ceiling, and retention policy. Current first-party documentation plus credentials only for a narrowly approved live check. Current Contract Common current hazards include legacy neural type usage, stale x-api-key examples instead of Bearer auth, unchecked Contents statuses, forced livecrawl everywhere, unbounded summaries or subpages, unsigned Monitor webhooks, and assumptions that code rollback cancels vendor-side work. Authentication For normal REST work, inject EXAAPIKEY from an approved server-side secret manager and send it only as Authorization: Bearer to the configured first-party Exa API host. Team Management service keys, hosted MCP OAuth or enterprise managed authorization, and payment-protocol calls are separate trust models. Never print, commit, place in a URL, or expose a credential to an untrusted client. Instructions 1. Search code and configuration for every Exa endpoint, SDK call, header, and key. 2. Flag legacy types, stale auth, hidden defaults, beta features, and unbounded parameters. 3. Trace partial statuses, error tags, request IDs, citations, costs, and redaction. 4. Inventory Agent runs, Monitors, Websets, Batches, webhooks, and teardown ownership. 5. Prioritize findings by credential, data, cost, correctness, and availability impact. 6. Repair one bounded contract at a time and add a regression assertion. Tool Discipline Use Read, Glob, and Grep to inspect repository code, configuration, fixtures, and evidence. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills jeremylongshore/exa-known-pitfalls