Ask the vault

This skill is read-only. It never creates, edits, or moves a note. If the user wants the answer itself saved, that's a separate capture of the conversation content (pasted text) — ask doesn't do that automatically.

Steps

1. Resolve the vault per Resolving the vault — an explicit directory named in the request, then the OBSIDIAN_VAULT environment variable, then the current directory. The OBSIDIAN_VAULT fallback is what lets this work consistently from an unrelated project directory or a different chat session, without repeating the vault path every time.
2. Check indexes/ first for a topic index matching the question — per Indexes, it's a faster, curated map of what exists and where than a cold grep. If nothing there covers it, or the question needs more than the index's own notes, grep the whole vault — all folders — for terms from the question: note titles, frontmatter tags, and body text. Read the notes that look relevant, starting with a handful; read more only if the question clearly needs broader coverage.
3. Answer directly from what those notes say. If the vault doesn't have an answer, say so plainly rather than guessing or silently falling back to general knowledge. It's fine to answer from general knowledge if the user asks for that too — just say explicitly when that's what's happening, versus when the answer is coming from the vault.
4. Cite which notes the answer drew from as [[wikilink]]s, so the user can jump to them in Obsidian.

Out of scope

No retrieval beyond Grep/glob text search (no BM25, embeddings, or reranking). No vault writes of any kind.