AI assistants
You can connect an AI assistant to LibreTimes and let it work on your account: search the index, read a work, check a bibliography against real records, keep your citation library tidy, and draft new work.
The connection uses the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which is the standard way an assistant talks to an outside service. You do not install anything – LibreTimes runs the server, your assistant connects to it over the web, and you sign in with your ordinary LibreTimes account.
- Connecting an assistant – the setup, per client.
- What an assistant can do – the full list, and what each one needs permission for.
The one rule worth knowing first
An assistant drafts. You publish.
There is no tool that makes anything public. An assistant can create a draft, rewrite a draft, build a private course and add lectures to it, and fill in your CV – but the act of publishing is yours, taken deliberately, in the web app. Nothing an assistant does appears on your public profile, in search, or in anyone's feed until you put it there.
This is deliberate and it is not a temporary limitation. An assistant works fast and does not always work correctly, and a mistake that reaches your public academic record is not the kind of mistake you want to find out about later. The same reasoning is why our content policy treats undisclosed machine-written work as a problem: the value of a profile is that a person stands behind it.
What an assistant cannot do
Some things are left out on purpose, and they will stay out.
| Not available | Why |
|---|---|
| Publishing anything | Above. Publishing is a person's act. |
| Claiming authorship of a work | Asserting that you wrote something is the same class of act. An assistant can find the work and tell you where to claim it. |
| Commenting, messaging, following, mentioning | Anything that reaches another person turns into spam or harassment the moment an assistant is talked into it by text it read somewhere. |
| Reading your reading history | It is private, and an assistant has nothing to do with it. |
| Acting as anyone but you | No tool takes another person's identity, in any form. An assistant connected to your account can only ever act as your account. |
What it can see
An assistant sees what you would see signed in as yourself, and nothing more. Public works, public profiles, your own drafts, your own library and citations, your own CV. Other people's private material is as invisible to it as it is to you.
A word about prompt injection
An assistant reads text that other people wrote – that is the point of it. Text can contain instructions, and an assistant can be fooled by them. This is a real and unsolved problem across the whole industry, not something particular to us.
Our answer is to keep the blast radius small: the tools that write are limited to your own drafts, your own library and your own CV, nothing an assistant does becomes public on its own, and every tool that could reach another person was left out. Read what an assistant produces before you publish it, the same way you would read a draft from a co-author.
Permissions
When you connect, you are asked to approve what the assistant may do. The read tools need no permission at all. Each kind of write is a separate permission, and you can grant some and refuse others – an assistant allowed to manage your citation library is not thereby allowed to touch your CV.
The tool reference names the permission each tool needs.