Slug> — Nathan Maxwell

"I can't see the films collection in the zotero app" — followed by "No, I haven't provided them yet — I just hit 'send'." (Meaning: the user hasn't yet provided ZOTERO_API_KEY/ZOTERO_USER_ID to ~/.hermes/.env.)

1. The collection is genuinely absent. The Zotero app is showing the source of truth. 2. The script will create it, but only after the user provides creds. The creds are a user-supplied secret; no LLM automation can substitute for the user's manual https://www.zotero.org/settings/keys/new step. 3. --verify-creds is the diagnostic tool the user can run as soon as creds land. It tells the user whether the auth round-trip works before committing to the real import.

On success: prints user_id, lists all existing collections with item counts, and notes whether "Films" already exists (idempotent case) or will be created on the real run (first-run case). On failure: exits with a typed HTTP error verbatim so the user can fix the specific field-level issue (wrong key, wrong user ID, rate limit, etc).

At that point the collection appears in the Zotero app within ~30 seconds (the script creates it + posts 53 film items in roughly 8-10 Zotero API calls, plus 53 PATCHes to assign items to the collection; estimated total time at the 10 req/sec rate limit: ~10 seconds for 124 requests in the worst case including --include-watched).

How it's structured

User's report (verbatim) "I can't see the films collection in the zotero app" — followed by "No, I haven't provided them yet — I just hit 'send'." (Meaning: the user…
Verified ground truth 'Films' COLLATE NOCASE` returns 0 rows. The collection does not exist in the local Zotero SQLite (and the SQLite is what the desktop Zotero…
What this means operationally The Zotero app is correct: the collection doesn't exist because no one has created it. The right next step is to set the env vars and run th…
What shipped (operational change, not durable knowledge) A --verify-creds mode was added to the script in 2026-07-02. Usage: ~/.hermes/hermes-agent/venv/bin/python \ ~/.hermes/scripts/letterboxd_…
What shipped (operational change, not durable knowledge) This is the smallest possible diagnostic gate between "I set creds" and "is the import going to work." The user's pre-flight can be a one-li…
What I did NOT do settings table. The local cache has account|userID = 9676313 which is a candidate for ZOTERO_USER_ID, but the SQLite is read-only by Zot…
… 7 more sections in the full essay