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Plugin and skills

The biotope plugin teaches coding agents how to run the knowledge-graph pipeline. The agent uses the same biotope CLI as a human; no separate agent API or MCP server is involved.

Install

/plugin marketplace add biocypher/biotope
/plugin install biotope@biotope

Add a team marketplace and import biocypher/biotope.

Add a marketplace from the CLI using https://github.com/biocypher/biotope.

To install skills without the plugin, copy the folders you need from skills/ into your agent's skills directory, such as .cursor/skills/ or .claude/skills/.

Choose a skill

Skill Use it for
biotope-croissant Build a graph from data: initaddmapbuild
biocypher Configure export backends, schemas, and Neo4j import
biochatter Query a loaded graph in natural language

Start with biotope-croissant. Add the other skills when the pipeline reaches those stages.

Work with the agent

Invoke /biotope-croissant to load the skill, or just describe the goal and let the agent trigger it:

Turn the CSVs in data/ into a knowledge graph of genes and diseases.

The skill drives the CLI for you. During a typical session:

  1. The agent asks what the graph should answer and which entities and relations matter. It records your answers as the project purpose instead of guessing from file shapes.
  2. It brings your data into the project and runs add, which creates a Croissant manifest for each dataset.
  3. It writes one mapping per dataset and previews each edit. A clean preview does not guarantee a connected graph, so this may take several passes.
  4. It builds the graph and checks node counts, edge counts, and orphaned edges before reporting success.

The agent asks before choosing the graph's purpose, extracting facts from unstructured files, selecting csv or neo4j, or changing the declared schema.

When the pipeline reaches export tuning or querying, the agent switches to the matching skill: biocypher for Neo4j import and schema config, biochatter for natural-language queries.

To write mappings yourself, see the mapping reference. For a full worked example, follow the tutorial.

Agents without skills

biotope init --agents-md adds a project-local AGENTS.md fallback. Use it only when your agent cannot load skills.