| name | recall |
| description | Natural language memory search. Use when the user asks "what did we decide about X", "do we know anything about X", "have we dealt with X before", or "/recall X". Faster than search-memory — single grep pass, no parallel agents. |
| allowed-tools | Bash, Read, Grep |
| effort | fast |
Skill: recall
Trigger phrases:
/recall [question or topic]- "what did we decide about X"
- "do we know anything about X"
- "have we seen X before"
- "what's in memory about X"
- Any quick single-topic lookup
Use search-memory instead when: the question could span 3+ memory categories and you want parallel agents with a synthesized answer.
Steps
Step 1 — Extract the query
Pull the search term(s) from the user's message. If it's a full question ("why did we move files to mobile/?"), extract the key nouns: "mobile files location".
Step 2 — Run the search
Try semantic search first (finds related memories even with different wording). Falls back to keyword search automatically if the index doesn't exist or sentence-transformers isn't installed.
python tools/memory.py --search-semantic "[query]" --top 8
Run this via Bash. If semantic search returns no matches, also run keyword search:
python tools/memory.py --search "[query]" --top 8
Step 3 — Present results
If results found:
## Recall: "[query]"
**[file name]** (score N)
> [matching lines]
**[file name]** (score N)
> [matching lines]
---
Bottom line: [1 sentence summary of what memory says]
If nothing found:
No memory found for "[query]".
This topic hasn't been captured yet. If it comes up this session, run /learn at the end to save it.
Step 4 — Offer to dive deeper
If a result looks relevant but partial:
"Found in lessons.md — want me to read the full entry?"
Notes
- Never write or modify memory files in this skill — read only
- If
memory.py is not found, fall back to: Grep(pattern="[query]", path="[MEM]") recursively
- This skill is intentionally fast — no agents, no synthesis overhead
- For broader research across multiple categories, use
search-memory
