finding-knowledge

name	finding-knowledge
description	Use before starting any task, investigation, or debugging session, and before answering "how does X work?" — search the project's journal and docs before re-deriving anything.
version	3

Finding Knowledge

Five minutes of index reading beats an hour of re-derivation. The project's memory lives in two indexes; consult them before touching code.

Search order

1. docs/journal/INDEX.md — has a past session touched this? Open the matching entries.
2. docs/INDEX.md — is it documented? Open the matching docs.
3. Follow tags: pick the relevant tag in docs/TAGS.md, then search tags:.*<tag> across docs/ with the Grep tool (files-with-matches mode).
4. Only then grep or read the codebase.

Rules

• Never re-investigate what a past entry already answers — cite the entry instead.
• If a found entry is outdated (the code moved on), update or mark it, and journal the correction. Stale memory is worse than no memory.
• Found nothing? Note it in one line ("no prior work on X in journal/docs") so the session's journal entry records that the search happened — that negative result saves the next session the same search.