recall

name	recall
description	Retrieve what a project already knows, with provenance and status, before asserting it. Use when grounding a statement, answering "what did we decide / find / read about X", or checking a draft's claims against the store. Auto-invoke by judgement whenever a claim could be verified against recorded knowledge. Drives kb-find; verifies each claim against its source before synthesizing.

recall — retrieval reasoning

Portable path rule: in commands below, replace <plugin-root> with the absolute plugin root two directories above this SKILL.md. Resolve it from the loaded skill path; do not assume a host-specific environment variable exists in the project shell.

Turn a question into grounded, cited knowledge. This is the reasoning layer over scripts/kb-find.ts — and where grounding lives (style stays with editio's humanizer). It is auto-invoked by judgement: if a claim under discussion could be checked against the store, check it rather than asserting from memory.

Procedure

1. Decompose. Break the question into retrievable sub-questions. A multi-hop question ("does our method beat the baseline on the hard cases?") splits into facts you can look up.
2. Retrieve header-first, then fetch only what you need. Two tiers — find the headers, then pull just the bodies the headers earned. For each sub-question:

   bun "<plugin-root>/scripts/kb-find.ts" "<sub-question>" [--substrate ledger|finding|lit|memory] [--status <S>] [--hops <n>] [--snippet]
   

   The card-catalog is the index: read the returned headers (add --snippet to see the matched line), decide which units are worth the body, then fetch just those — never the whole ledger:

   bun "<plugin-root>/scripts/kb-get.ts" "<path>" [--title "<title>"]   # <path> = kb-find's 3rd ` · ` column
   

   kb-get returns one unit's text — a page's whole file, or a single ledger entry's slice (not the ~200 it shares a file with); --title disambiguates a same-second anchor. Widen --hops (1–2) when you need associative neighbours, not just direct keyword hits.
3. Confidence-gate on status — this is the calibration source:
   • ledger:CONJECTURED, finding:CONJECTURED, memory:provisional → weak; hedge.
   • finding:VALIDATED, ledger:VALIDATED, memory:validated → firm; state plainly.
   • lit:CITE → citable prior art; attribute it by name.
   • ledger:DEADEND, finding:REFUTED, finding:SUPERSEDED → say it failed / was overturned.
4. Verify. Read each unit you cite — its body via kb-get (a page or a ledger slice), or a lit unit's source#anchor at the real source. Do not pass through a unit you didn't read. If the store doesn't back the claim, say unsupported, don't invent.
5. Synthesize. Answer in the form the caller (grannie, a reviewer, editio's humanizer) can render honestly: each point carries its substrate:status and its citation.

Output shape

<claim> — <substrate:status> — <source#anchor or path>

If nothing is found, say so plainly and suggest storing it once it's known. Retrieval that invents coverage is worse than retrieval that admits a gap.