claude-mods/skills/tool-discovery/reference.md

Tool Discovery Reference

Authoritative recommendations for common tasks. Use these instead of manual implementations.

File Formats

Documents

Format	Python	CLI	Notes
PDF	PyMuPDF, pdfplumber	pdftotext	PyMuPDF for complex, pdfplumber for tables
Word (.docx)	python-docx	pandoc
Excel (.xlsx)	openpyxl, pandas		openpyxl for formatting, pandas for data
CSV	pandas, csv	csvkit	pandas for analysis, csv for streaming
JSON	json, orjson	jq	orjson 10x faster than json
YAML	PyYAML, ruamel.yaml	yq	ruamel preserves comments
TOML	tomllib (3.11+), toml	yq
XML	lxml, xml.etree	xmlstarlet	lxml for speed
Markdown	markdown, mistune	pandoc

Images

Task	Python	CLI	Notes
Read/Write	Pillow (PIL)	imagemagick
Computer Vision	opencv-python
OCR	pytesseract, paddleocr	tesseract	paddleocr more accurate
Metadata	exifread, Pillow	exiftool
QR Codes	qrcode, pyzbar	zbarimg

Audio/Video

Task	Python	CLI	Notes
Audio I/O	pydub, soundfile	ffmpeg
Audio Analysis	librosa		Feature extraction, spectrograms
Speech-to-Text	whisper, vosk		whisper most accurate
Video	moviepy, opencv	ffmpeg
Transcoding	ffmpeg-python	ffmpeg

Archives

Format	Python	CLI
ZIP	zipfile	unzip
TAR/GZ	tarfile	tar
7z	py7zr	7z
RAR	rarfile	unrar

Data Processing

Structured Data

Task	Python	CLI
DataFrames	pandas, polars
SQL Queries	sqlalchemy, sqlite3	sqlite3
GraphQL	gql, sgqlc
Protobuf	protobuf	protoc

Text Processing

Task	Python	CLI
Regex	re	rg, grep
Find/Replace	re.sub()	sd, sed
Diff	difflib	delta, difft
Fuzzy Match	fuzzywuzzy, rapidfuzz	fzf
NLP	spacy, nltk
Tokenization	tiktoken

Web/Network

Task	Python	CLI
HTTP Requests	httpx, requests	curl, http
Web Scraping	beautifulsoup4, selectolax	firecrawl
HTML Parsing	lxml, html5lib
URL Parsing	urllib.parse, furl
WebSockets	websockets, socketio	websocat
DNS	dnspython	dig

Domain-Specific

Scientific Computing

Domain	Python
Arrays/Math	numpy
Scientific	scipy
Statistics	statsmodels, scipy.stats
Symbolic Math	sympy
Plotting	matplotlib, plotly
Geospatial	geopandas, shapely

Machine Learning

Task	Python
General ML	scikit-learn
Deep Learning	pytorch, tensorflow
NLP Models	transformers (HuggingFace)
Computer Vision	torchvision, timm
Embeddings	sentence-transformers
LLM Inference	llama-cpp-python, vllm

Cryptography

Task	Python
Hashing	hashlib
Encryption	cryptography
JWT	pyjwt
Passwords	bcrypt, argon2-cffi
Secrets	secrets (stdlib)

Games/Puzzles

Domain	Python
Chess	python-chess
Sudoku	py-sudoku
Graph Problems	networkx
Optimization	ortools, pulp

Bioinformatics

Task	Python
Sequences	biopython
Genomics	pysam, pyvcf
Protein	biotite

CLI Tools (Modern Replacements)

Instead of	Use	Why
find	fd	5x faster, simpler syntax
grep	rg (ripgrep)	10x faster, respects .gitignore
ls	eza	Git status, icons, tree view
cat	bat	Syntax highlighting
du	dust	Visual tree sorted by size
man	tldr	Practical examples only
sed	sd	Simpler syntax
diff	delta, difft	Syntax highlighting, AST-aware
top	btm	Better graphs
ps	procs	Enhanced process view

Verification Commands

Before using a tool, verify it's available:

# Python packages
pip list | grep <package>
python -c "import <package>; print(<package>.__version__)"

# CLI tools
which <tool>
<tool> --version

# Install if missing
pip install <package>
# or
uv pip install <package>  # 10-100x faster

Decision Tree

Need to process X?
├── Is X a standard file format?
│   └── Check "File Formats" section
├── Is X a data transformation?
│   └── Check "Data Processing" section
├── Is X domain-specific?
│   └── Check "Domain-Specific" section
└── Is X a CLI operation?
    └── Check "CLI Tools" section