This is a good question without a good answer. zsh-autoquoter doesn't know -- it doesn't know anything, really. The only thing it does is pass the literal string you type as an argument to the command you run (in this case, ssh).
So you could get the "treat it as a shell variable on the remote server" behavior by writing this instead:
ssh user@host awk "{print $1}" file.txt
But there's no way, using zsh-autoquoter, to say "yeah but this particular part of the string should not be escaped; let my local shell handle it."
So you could get the "treat it as a shell variable on the remote server" behavior by writing this instead:
But there's no way, using zsh-autoquoter, to say "yeah but this particular part of the string should not be escaped; let my local shell handle it."