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Skill

choose-your-parallel-api

@parallel-web Updated 2026-10-21

Choose the right Parallel API and configuration for cost, latency, and answer quality. Use when adding live web data to an app: current events and prices, a cited answer in a chat, grounding an agent in sources it can read in full, reading a URL or PDF, deep research reports, researching or enriching every row of a list or CRM. Use when picking among Search and Extract, Responses, and Task, or when choosing a search mode, reasoning effort, or Task processor. Also use when an integration is too slow, costs more than expected, or misses answers that are on the web.

Install

With your agent

Install OMGSkills skill "parallel-web/parallel-agent-skills:skills/choose-your-parallel-api" into this agent's normal skills directory: call the OMGSkills MCP get_install_plan tool for your agent and run the script it returns (it installs only the pinned commit and verifies SKILL.md), and stop if MCP or the pin is unavailable. Do not overwrite or change existing skills without asking me.

Manual command

git clone https://github.com/parallel-web/parallel-agent-skills /tmp/parallel-agent-skills && ln -s /tmp/parallel-agent-skills/skills/choose-your-parallel-api ~/.claude/skills/choose-your-parallel-api

From README

Choose the right Parallel API and configuration This skill covers four Parallel APIs for adding web data to an app. Search finds pages, Extract reads them, Responses answers a question, Task fills a schema. Search and Extract are one pattern, not two choices. Search locates the pages and returns excerpts; Extract returns the full content of the ones worth reading. Most agent integrations want both. Choose once, while writing the integration — not on every request. A live classifier in the request path buys flexibility nobody asked for and charges a model round-trip for it on every call. Decide here; hard-code the result. Most disappointing results come from choosing the wrong API or configuration, not from the underlying quality: the right API at the wrong tier, or the right tier with the wrong knobs. Choose the API first, tier second, knobs third — in that order. PARALLELAPIKEY is the connection secret, server side.