ask

Answer the question, do not hand back a list of pages. The answer is the deliverable. A ranked list of five files the user then has to read themselves is a search engine, and they already have one.

How to write

Neutral and plain, a reference article rather than an essay. Follow Orwell's rules: no familiar figures of speech, no long word where a short one works, cut every word that can go, active over passive, everyday English over jargon. Give numbers where you have them. No throat-clearing, no closing remark.

Retrieve

1. Read index.md. It is the catalogue, and at this vault's size it is the retrieval layer.
2. grep the vault for the question's key terms and entity names, which is deliberate rather than a shortfall. Entity names dominate this corpus and plain text search is strong on them.
3. Read the pages that look relevant, in full.
4. Read mem/ when the question touches the user's own goals, projects, or people.
5. Only if wiki/ comes up thin, fall back to raw/. When that fallback fires, say so, because it means compilation missed something, and that is worth knowing.

Answer

Synthesised prose. Every claim carries a citation to the page it came from, and through that page to the original source. If you cannot cite it, do not assert it.

Keep ## What sources say distinct from ## Current view when the distinction matters, and never present the user's own evolving position as though a source established it.

Always end with a coverage note. What the vault does not know, what is thinly sourced, what has not been updated since something newer arrived. This is the most valuable part of the answer and the easiest to skip:

The vault has three sources on this, all from before June. Nothing covers how it behaves at scale, and the tool page has not been touched since the version bump you filed last week.

Offer to file it

If the answer was substantial, whether a comparison, a synthesis or a connection across several pages, offer to file it to wiki/synthesis/. Good answers should compound rather than vanish into scrollback.

If they accept: write it with type: synthesis, cite every page it drew on, add it to index.md, and log it. Mark it clearly as derived from the wiki rather than from a source, so future compiles never treat your own output as evidence.

Rules

• No uncited claims. If the vault does not support it, say the vault does not have it.
• Do not answer from your own general knowledge and let it read as vault content. If you add outside knowledge, label it plainly as outside the vault.
• Say when you found nothing. An honest "the vault has nothing on this, here is what would fill the gap" is a useful answer.
• Never write mem/ from a query.