Building with LLMs

Why Pixeltable Is Easy to Vibe-Code

Pixeltable’s API is declarative — you say what you want, not how to wire it up. That means LLMs get it right on the first try. Ask your AI tool to “summarize articles with GPT-4o-mini” and you get working code:

import pixeltable as pxt
from pixeltable.functions.openai import chat_completions

t = pxt.create_table('app.articles', {'title': pxt.String, 'body': pxt.String})

t.add_computed_column(response=chat_completions(
    messages=[{'role': 'user', 'content': t.body}], model='gpt-4o-mini'))
t.add_computed_column(summary=t.response.choices[0].message.content)

t.insert([{'title': 'Climate Report', 'body': 'Global temperatures rose 1.2°C ...'}])
t.select(t.title, t.summary).collect()

Ten lines of code — and the result is persistent, versioned, traceable, and incrementally optimized. Every output is stored, every transformation is replayable, and new rows only recompute what changed. The same pattern scales to RAG pipelines, video frame extraction, tool-calling agents, and semantic search.

Set Up Your AI Tool

Pick the setup that matches your editor. These aren’t mutually exclusive — use whichever combination helps.

Cursor / Windsurf
Claude Code
Any LLM

Drop our AGENTS.md into your project root. Cursor, Windsurf, and similar agents pick it up automatically and use it as context for code generation.

curl -o AGENTS.md https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pixeltable/pixeltable/main/AGENTS.md

For Claude-based editors, the same file is also available as CLAUDE.md.

Install the Pixeltable Skill — Claude discovers it automatically when you ask about Pixeltable. It loads a concise SKILL.md first, then pulls in the full API reference only when needed.

# Plugin install (recommended — auto-updates)
/plugin marketplace add pixeltable/pixeltable-skill
/plugin install pixeltable-skill@pixeltable-skill

# Or manual install
git clone https://github.com/pixeltable/pixeltable-skill.git /tmp/pxt-skill
cp -r /tmp/pxt-skill/skills/pixeltable-skill ~/.claude/skills/

Append .md to any docs URL to get a plain-text version optimized for LLMs. Paste it straight into your chat.

Resource	URL
Any docs page as markdown	`https://docs.pixeltable.com/<path>.md` — e.g., this page
Site index for LLMs	llms.txt (standard)
Full site map with metadata	llms-full.txt

MCP Servers

Connect your AI tool to Pixeltable directly via the Model Context Protocol. We ship two servers — or you can build your own using pxt.mcp_udfs().

Docs Search (Hosted)
Developer Server
Build Your Own

Search the full documentation from Claude Desktop, Cursor, or Windsurf:

https://docs.pixeltable.com/mcp

Exposes a SearchPixeltableDocumentation tool that returns relevant content, code examples, and direct links.

32 tools for creating tables, running queries, managing dependencies, and executing Python — all from your AI editor. Experimental; great for prototyping.

# Install
uv tool install --from git+https://github.com/pixeltable/mcp-server-pixeltable-developer.git mcp-server-pixeltable-developer

# Add to Claude Code
claude mcp add pixeltable mcp-server-pixeltable-developer

See configuration for Cursor, Claude Desktop, and more in the repo README.

Any Pixeltable UDF or query function can be exposed as an MCP tool with a single call:

import pixeltable as pxt

@pxt.udf
def lookup_customer(name: str) -> str:
    """Look up customer info by name."""
    t = pxt.get_table('app.customers')
    return t.where(t.name == name).select(t.info).collect()[0]['info']

tools = pxt.tools(lookup_customer)

pxt.tools() wraps your functions so any MCP-compatible client can call them. See the MCP integration guide for the full setup.

Start Building

Use the app template to scaffold a full-stack project. It wires up a FastAPI backend and React frontend on top of Pixeltable — document upload, cross-modal search, and a tool-calling agent, all powered by computed columns. Ask your AI tool to customize it from there.

Pixeltable App Template

Full-stack skeleton: FastAPI + React + Pixeltable for multimodal AI workloads

Next Steps

Quick Start

Install and run your first pipeline in 5 minutes

Computed Columns

The core pattern LLMs generate — learn how it works

Tool Calling

Build agents with UDFs, queries, and MCP tools

Agents & MCP

Full use case walkthrough for AI agents

Welcome to Pixeltable

Core Concepts

How-To

Why Pixeltable Is Easy to Vibe-Code

Set Up Your AI Tool

MCP Servers

Start Building

Pixeltable App Template

Next Steps

Quick Start

Computed Columns

Tool Calling

Agents & MCP

Welcome to Pixeltable

Core Concepts

How-To

​Why Pixeltable Is Easy to Vibe-Code

​Set Up Your AI Tool

​MCP Servers

​Start Building

Pixeltable App Template

​Next Steps

Quick Start

Computed Columns

Tool Calling

Agents & MCP

Why Pixeltable Is Easy to Vibe-Code

Set Up Your AI Tool

MCP Servers

Start Building

Next Steps