Ask a VSS video question

When to Use

• Answer a question about previously analyzed or freshly scoped VSS video
• Read a stored VSS memory job or record by id
• Answer a question that requires running vss memory introspect
• Answer a directly scoped URL, file, or sensor-window question via vss vlm run

Not for video retrieval or metadata-answerable questions.

Answer from the cheapest grounded source that can satisfy the question. For a running VSS deployment, use the installed vss CLI. Do not call an OpenAI-compatible /chat/completions endpoint directly or fall back to raw REST when a CLI command fails.

This skill does not call POST /generate on the VSS agent. It requires a deployed VSS with vss configure already run.

Hard rule, use the vss CLI. vss configure has already pointed it at the deployment's proxy, so every VSS action goes through that CLI and nothing reaches the deployment any other way.

Four things follow, because each has been done instead:

• use the vss on PATH (see Prerequisites) and call it as vss. Do not build a parallel virtualenv or wrap it in another launcher;
• vss vlm run is the only eye on the video - never post to /v1/chat/completions, /generate or /v1/summarize yourself, and never decode or sample frames and answer from them;
• a named sensor is --sensor, never a file, and its window goes in --start-time/--end-time, not the prompt. A name the deployment knows as a sensor stays a sensor even when a file of that name sits on disk: that file is a copy someone left behind, and --file on it drops the recorded timeline the window flags need, so the window is rejected and the call looks worth retrying;
• a failing call is a finding: report the exit code rather than routing around it, repairing the deployment, or looking again.

Prerequisites