liteparse

Effective LiteParse

Extract text from documents locally with the lit CLI — a fast, model-free parser. This skill is about using it cheaply: each lit parse re-runs full extraction, and every line you dump into the conversation is paid for on every subsequent turn. The patterns below come from analyzing real agent traces where the same PDF was parsed up to 9 times and single image reads cost 140k+ characters of context. Don't repeat those mistakes.

The golden rule: parse ONCE to a file, then search the file

lit parse re-extracts the whole document every time you call it. Re-parsing per search is the #1 waste seen in traces. Parse a document exactly once, to a temp file, then run all your searches against that file:

# ONE TIME, per document. --no-ocr for born-digital PDFs (almost all reports) — much faster.
lit parse "/abs/path/doc.pdf" --format text --no-ocr -o /tmp/doc.txt && wc -l /tmp/doc.txt

Then search the file with cheap shell tools — never re-run lit parse to search again.

Search discipline — minimize ROUND-TRIPS, then keep results small

Every Bash call is a full model round-trip (latency + re-read of context). The biggest waste after parsing is a serial loop: grep → look → grep again → sed to read the window → grep again. In traces this doubled the turn count versus just reading the doc. Two rules fix it:

1. Get context in the SAME command — don't grep then sed. Use grep -C so the surrounding lines come back with the hit. This removes the follow-up sed turn for the common case:

grep -n -i -C4 "total assets" /tmp/doc.txt | head -40      # location AND its window, one turn

Only fall back to sed -n 'A,Bp' when you already know the exact line and need a wider window than -C gave you.

2. Batch independent lookups into ONE command. When a question needs several distinct facts (e.g. emissions and revenue), don't spend one turn per term. Probe them together with labels:

for q in "carbon intensity" "scope 1" "total revenue"; do \
  echo "=== $q ==="; grep -n -i -C3 "$q" /tmp/doc.txt | head -25; done