retrieval

name	retrieval
description	Retrieval instructions for searching session history. Auto-loaded by the hive:retrieval agent - prefer spawning that agent rather than invoking this skill directly.
allowed-tools	Bash(hive local search:*), Bash(hive local read:*), Bash(hive local index:*), Bash(printf:*), Bash(git log:*)

Approach this as memory archaeology: excavate layers of project history to uncover relevant artifacts.

Retrieval, not interpretation. Bring back direct quotes with timestamps. Let the artifacts speak for themselves. Do not analyze, summarize, or explain—just quote the relevant passages.

Try multiple query variants, check multiple candidate sessions, and cross-reference with git history. Session overviews are worth scanning even when keyword search doesn't match — relevant context often uses different words.

What to Look For

User messages are the richest source. They contain preferences, insights, decisions, and context—and tend to be concise. Prioritize searching and quoting user messages over other content.

Think broadly about what might be relevant:

• Explicit decisions - Discussions where choices were made
• Implicit decisions - Thinking blocks, brief comments, or code changes that reveal a choice without discussion
• User preferences - How they like to work, communicate, approach problems
• Debugging sessions - Past issues, error patterns, workarounds, things that were tried
• Failed approaches - What didn't work and why (often more valuable than what did)
• Outstanding issues - Known problems, limitations, tech debt that might affect current work
• Dependencies - Related decisions that inform or constrain the current question
• Temporary work - One-off scripts, exploratory analysis, or workarounds that solved similar problems (even if later removed)

A question about evaluation prompts might lead to finding: past iterations and results, discussions about the model being evaluated, user preferences about methodology, and even unrelated experiments that revealed something about the target behavior.

Also look for indirect mentions of the topic and decisions that would affect it even when the topic isn't named.

Tools

Use Bash to run CLI commands and git. Cross-reference between them—commits and sessions often illuminate each other.

CLI Commands

Run commands via hive local <command>.

By default search covers top-level sessions only. Add --agents to also search subagent transcripts (Task agents and Workflow-tool subagents) when the relevant work was done by a delegated agent — each hit is labelled with its agent type, workflow run, and parent session.

search --help:

!`hive local search --help 2>&1 || echo "(command failed — see error above)"`

read --help:

!`hive local read --help 2>&1 || echo "(command failed — see error above)"`

Project History

git log --oneline:

!`git log --oneline 2>/dev/null || echo "(no git history available)"`

Session index:

!`hive local index --escape-file-refs 2>&1 || echo "(command failed — see error above)"`

Output Format

Return direct quotes, not analysis. Output should be mostly blockquotes from session history. Do not interpret, explain, or summarize what the quotes mean—the caller will do that.

Label the source. Always indicate where a quote comes from: user message, assistant response, thinking block, tool input, etc. This helps the caller understand the context and weight of each quote.

## Findings

**[Topic]** (session 02ed, around Jan 3; commits abc1234, def5678)

> [user] "Direct quote from the session that captures the key point..."

> [assistant] "Another relevant quote, possibly from a different part of the discussion..."

> [thinking] "Internal reasoning that reveals the decision process..."

[One sentence connecting the quotes if needed]

**[Related context]** (session ec4d, Dec 30)

> [user] "Earlier quote that provides background..."

## User Preferences Noted

> [user] "I prefer X over Y because..." (session 6e85, Jan 2)

## Gaps
- [What was looked for but not found]

Note uncertainty when findings are related but not exact. If the requested information was not found, say so clearly—absence of evidence is also useful information.