Read Later Skill

When to use

Use this skill when the user wants to:

• save links for later reading,
• get concise summaries and tags,
• ask follow-up questions like "what did that article say?",
• retrieve original links quickly.

Preconditions

• MongoDB MCP is connected and write-enabled.
• Target database and collection are fixed:
• Database: readlater
• Collection: articles
• The collection follows references/mongodb-collection-schema.md.

Core workflow

1. Receive link + optional user note from the current chat or agent environment.
2. Normalize URL (remove obvious tracking params).
3. Build url_hash from normalized URL.
4. Deduplicate:

• First by canonical_url.
• Fallback by url_hash.

1. Build structured document:

• title,
• source site,
• user note,
• short summary,
• key points,
• tags,
• topic,
• language,
• saved time.

1. Write to MongoDB:

• Insert if not found.
• Else update only whitelisted fields.

1. Return acknowledgment:

• one-sentence summary,
• tags,
• record id,
• original URL.

Retrieval workflow

When user asks questions (for example "last week the xxx article said what?"):

1. Parse constraints:

• time range (for "last week", use the previous Monday-Sunday in user locale),
• topic keywords,
• optional source/site.

1. Query MongoDB documents with filters.
2. Rank candidates by topic/tag match and recency.
3. Answer with evidence-first format:

• short answer,
• 2-4 bullet key points,
• original article URL,
• record id.

1. If confidence is low, ask one clarification question before final answer.

Response contract

Always include:

• Answer: direct response in plain language.
• Why: evidence from stored summary/key points.
• Links: original URL first, record id second.

Never invent article details. If record data is insufficient, say so explicitly.

Write policy

• Keep summary to 120-220 Chinese characters by default.
• Keep key points to 3-5 bullets.
• tags: generate 3-6 specific tags from the article content. Tags are free-form and should not be limited to the topic taxonomy.
• topic: choose one primary category from this stable taxonomy:
• AI
• Engineering
• Product
• Business
• Design
• Data
• Science
• Media
• Society
• Health
• Lifestyle

Read policy

• For "what did it say", prefer stored Key Points and Evidence Snippets.
• For "exact wording", return best available snippet and source link.
• For "which one was that article", return top 3 candidates with links.

Safety rules

• Never write outside readlater.articles.
• Never upsert without dedupe check.
• Only update these fields:
• title
• summary
• key_points
• tags
• topic
• user_note
• last_updated_at
• If MongoDB MCP is unavailable, return an explicit error and ask for MCP fix. Do not fallback to local memory files.

References

• Collection schema: references/mongodb-collection-schema.md
• Answer templates: references/reply-templates.md
• Smoke test: references/smoke-test.md