pensieve-search

name

pensieve-search

description

Search the user's local Pensieve screenshot archive by text, app, or time range. Use when the user asks to find a screenshot ("find that thing I looked at last week", "show me when I was working on the Mastra integration", "find screenshots of the YouTube video about X"), or to locate a specific moment in time across captured activity. Returns ranked entity_ids with filepaths, timestamps, OCR snippets, and VLM-extracted structured metadata (app, topic, workspace). Can open the image locally for the user. Skip when the user wants aggregated stats, time-series analytics, or cross-day project rollups — those need separate tools.

Pensieve Search Skill

Pensieve (memos) continuously captures screenshots and indexes them. This skill teaches you to query that index over its HTTP API.

Where the data lives

• Server: http://127.0.0.1:8839 by default (config: server_host / server_port).
  • Override with MEMOS_SERVER_HOST / MEMOS_SERVER_PORT env vars or ~/.memos/config.yaml if the user has a non-default setup. Confirm with the user if the default doesn't respond.
• Screenshots on disk: ~/.memos/screenshots/YYYYMMDD/<entity>.webp. The API returns filepath directly so you don't have to compute it.
• Web UI (same server, browser-friendly):
  • Search page (mirrors API filters as URL params): http://127.0.0.1:8839/?q=...&start=...&end=...&app_names=...&library_ids=... — you should always offer this URL in your reply so the user can click and verify results visually.
  • Entity detail page: http://127.0.0.1:8839/entities/<id> — opens one specific screenshot in context with its metadata. Offer this for any hit you cite.
  • Config page: http://127.0.0.1:8839/config — surface this if the user asks about settings.

Pre-flight check

Before the first query in a session, verify the server is up:

curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" "http://127.0.0.1:8839/api/search?q=test"

200 means good. 000 or connection-refused means memos isn't running — tell the user to start it (memos serve or system-service).

Always quote the URL — the ? and & are zsh glob characters and will fail with no matches found if unquoted. Every curl example below assumes a quoted URL.

The endpoint

GET /api/search

Parameters:

Param	Type	Notes
q	string	Full-text query (jieba-tokenized; works for Chinese + English mixed). Empty q="" returns recent screenshots without ranking.
start, end	int (UNIX seconds, UTC)	Time window on file_created_at. Both required together.
app_names	string	Comma-separated active_app values, e.g. "Google Chrome,iTerm2".
library_ids	string	Comma-separated; usually leave unset to query all.
limit	int 1..200	Default 48. Use 10–20 for casual queries, 200 only when scanning.
facet	bool	Include facet_counts (per-app counts), date_range (earliest/latest), and date_buckets (count per day or month, see Strategy 5). Set true on broad queries to help narrow.
date	string	Bucket filter, YYYY-MM or YYYY-MM-DD. Intersected with start/end.

Returns SearchResult { hits: [...] }. Each hit:

{
  "document": {
    "id": "12345",
    "filepath": "/Users/.../screenshots/20260423/00001.webp",
    "file_created_at": "2026-04-23T04:18:21+00:00",
    "tags": [],
    "metadata_entries": [
      {"key": "active_app", "value": "iTerm2", "source": "..."},
      {"key": "active_window", "value": "✳ Debug memos service background job issue", "source": "..."},
      {"key": "ocr_result", "value": "...long JSON of OCR boxes...", "source": "ocr"},
      {"key": "structured_vlm_v1_qwen3_6_35b", "value": {"primary": {"app": "Claude Code", "title_or_topic": "...", "what": "...", "workspace": "memos"}}, "source": "structured_vlm"},
      ...
    ]
  }
}

The metadata_entries is the goldmine — the VLM-extracted structured fields (primary.app, primary.title_or_topic, primary.what, primary.workspace) live inside the structured_vlm_v1_* entry's value. The value is a parsed JSON object, not a string — access fields directly with .value.primary.what. Do NOT pipe through fromjson (it will error with "only strings can be parsed"). The exact key suffix (e.g. qwen3_6_35b) varies per install — match with select(.key | startswith("structured_vlm")).

Important: that JSON metadata is also fully tokenized into the FTS index. So q="Claude Code Mastra workspace" will match a screenshot whose VLM said app=Claude Code, what="...Mastra...", workspace=... — even if "Mastra" doesn't appear in the OCR text.

How to query well

Strategy 0 — look at raw results before narrowing

Resist the urge to pre-anchor on what you think the user means. A "find 最终幻想" question sounds like it's about the game, but the same brand lives across YouTube videos, Bilibili clips, wallpaper engines, wikis, store pages, and game launchers. The user's casual phrasing names the topic, not the surface — only the corpus knows where they actually consumed it.

So run one wide query first and let the results tell you what surfaces exist:

curl -s --get 'http://127.0.0.1:8839/api/search' \
  --data-urlencode 'q=最终幻想' --data-urlencode 'facet=true' --data-urlencode 'limit=20' > /tmp/raw.json
jq -r '.hits[].document
  | "\(.file_created_at)  \([.metadata_entries[] | select(.key=="active_app") | .value][0] // "?")  \([.metadata_entries[] | select(.key=="url") | .value // "-"][0])  \([.metadata_entries[] | select(.key=="active_window") | .value // "-"][0] | .[0:80])"' /tmp/raw.json

Sample output (verified on a real install):

2026-04-03T15:26Z  Google Chrome  about:blank                                    (55) When Tifa played「Tifa's T…Rebirth🖤 Ru's Piano - YouTube
2026-04-02T15:47Z  Google Chrome  about:blank                                    (55) Final Fantasy X「To Zanark… Medley | Ru's Piano - YouTube
2026-02-15T15:59Z  Google Chrome  https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1K2HQzbEAy…  “蒂法的审视 手机动态壁纸 wallpaper engine_哔哩哔哩_bilibili”🔊
2026-01-30T05:17Z  Google Chrome  https://www.bilibili.com/                      哔哩哔哩 (゜-゜)つロ 干杯~-bilibili

Now you know: the user doesn't play Final Fantasy — they watch Ru's Piano play FF themes on YouTube, and 蒂法的审视 wallpaper engine clips on Bilibili. If you'd anchored on q=最终幻想 game or guessed app_names=Final Fantasy you'd have found nothing. The corpus revealed both the surfaces (YouTube + Bilibili) AND the user's actual relationship to the topic (music + wallpapers, not gameplay).

Now you can build per-surface queries anchored on each surface's stable identifier and merge the timelines.

Anchor on stable identifiers, not free-text names, because free-text is noisy — short or common substrings match the library_ids= parameter inside memos's own URL bar, and a CJK brand name often matches OCR'd filenames of unrelated downloaded videos. Stable identifiers come from the URL or the exact app name:

• Website: domain in the URL (guancha.cn, youtube.com/watch?v=…)
• Bilibili channel: UID in space.bilibili.com/<uid> (e.g. 10330740)
• YouTube channel: handle in URL (@mastra-ai, @RusPiano)
• App / brand on macOS: exact active_app value (iTerm2, Google Chrome, 企业微信)

Cross-check every match by filtering hits client-side on the URL or app fields — never trust the FTS hit list alone for "did the user actually visit / consume X" questions. The skill's job is to use multiple raw queries + client-side filtering to give the user a true answer, not to take the first FTS rank as gospel.

Strategy 1 — content keywords first

curl -s 'http://127.0.0.1:8839/api/search?q=Mastra+roadmap&limit=15' | jq '.hits[].document | {id, filepath, file_created_at}'

Joining terms with + (URL-encoded space) gives an AND query (jieba splits, then FTS5 does AND-of-tokens). Mix English + Chinese freely: q=理赔+Demo+演示.

Strategy 2 — narrow with app

The user's active_app is recorded literally per OS. Common values:

• macOS: Google Chrome, iTerm2, Claude, Cursor, WeChat, 企业微信
• Windows: msedge.exe, chrome.exe, WeChat.exe, claude.exe

curl -s 'http://127.0.0.1:8839/api/search?q=mastra+roadmap&app_names=Google+Chrome&limit=10' \
  | jq '.hits[].document | {id, filepath, file_created_at}'

Strategy 3 — narrow with time

Times are UNIX seconds, UTC. Compute with date:

# "last 7 days"
SINCE=$(date -v-7d -u +%s 2>/dev/null || date -d '7 days ago' -u +%s)
NOW=$(date -u +%s)

curl -s "http://127.0.0.1:8839/api/search?q=mastra&start=$SINCE&end=$NOW&limit=20"

For specific local dates: parse the user's date words (e.g. "上周三" → resolve to absolute → 00:00 local → UNIX UTC) and use a 1- or 24-hour window.

Strategy 4 — combine

The fastest path to a precise hit is q + app + tight time window. For "find the YouTube Mastra roadmap livestream from last week":

SINCE=$(date -v-10d -u +%s 2>/dev/null || date -d '10 days ago' -u +%s)
NOW=$(date -u +%s)
curl -s "http://127.0.0.1:8839/api/search?q=mastra+roadmap+youtube&app_names=Google+Chrome&start=$SINCE&end=$NOW&limit=10" > /tmp/hits.json
jq '.hits[].document | {id, filepath, file_created_at}' /tmp/hits.json

Tip: pipe the response to a tmp file before complex jq filters. Inline shell-quoted jq with nested \"...\" escapes is fragile — use a file.

Strategy 5 — facet to discover

When q returns hundreds of results, set facet=true to see what apps and time range dominate the matches:

curl -s 'http://127.0.0.1:8839/api/search?q=mastra&facet=true&limit=5' \
  | jq '{date_range, bucket_unit, date_buckets: .date_buckets[:10], facet_counts: .facet_counts[0].counts[:10]}'

• date_range (top-level): {earliest, latest} ISO timestamps spanning all matched entities under the current filters. Use it to suggest a tighter start/end window.
• date_buckets (top-level): [{date, count}] grouped by day or month — the bucket unit is adaptive based on the matched span (≤ 60 days → day, else month). The chosen unit is reported in bucket_unit. Single-bucket results are suppressed (returned as empty + bucket_unit=null) since they're not useful for narrowing.
• facet_counts[0].counts: list of {value, count} for active_app, sorted desc. Use it to suggest an app_names= filter, or to ask the user which app they meant.

All three are populated only when facet=true (or when settings.facet=true server-side).

To drill into a bucket, re-issue with ?date=YYYY-MM or ?date=YYYY-MM-DD. The server intersects date with the existing filters; if you also set start/end, the effective range is the overlap. After drilling into a month, the next response's date_buckets automatically adapts to days within that month.

Handling large result sets

/api/search caps limit at 200 per request, but the response now exposes the real total under filters in the found field. Use it directly — no heuristics needed.

Reading found and out_of

Every response includes:

{ "found": 2883, "out_of": 1464297, "hits": [ ... 200 items ... ], ... }

• found — unbounded count of FTS matches under your filters (q, start/end, app_names, library_ids). This is the truthful answer to "how many things matched my keywords?". If found > limit, there are more matches you didn't get back.
• out_of — total entities in the collection scope (library_ids only — q/start/end/app_names are dropped). Typesense convention: "found N out of M total". Surface this only when the user asks dataset-level questions ("how many screenshots do I have?"); for normal "find X" replies use found.

Edge case: very rarely, found < len(hits) when vector search contributes hits whose FTS rank was zero (e.g. queries with no good keyword match but semantic neighbors). Treat found as the keyword-match count, with the understanding that hits may include a few extra semantic neighbors.

Decision flow

resp  = search(q, start, end, limit=200)
hits  = resp.hits
found = resp.found

if found <= len(hits):
    return hits                              # complete, done

if user wants "top match" / "first few":
    return hits[:N]                          # top-ranked are already here

if user wants comprehensive scan ("show me everything ..."):
    return time_slice(q, start, end)         # recipe below — still needed (no offset yet)

else:
    tell user: f"{found} matches, narrow with app or shorter time window"

Recipe: time-window slicing

For "show me every screenshot of X in the last week", recursively halve the time window when truncation hits. Always use a tmp file for the response body — bash command substitution $(curl ...) mangles JSON that contains literal newlines or control chars (which OCR / VLM metadata frequently does).

# bash function — paste into agent shell or save as ~/bin/pensieve-paged-search.sh
paged_search() {
    local q="$1" start="$2" end="$3"
    local tmp
    tmp=$(mktemp)
    curl -s "http://127.0.0.1:8839/api/search?q=$(echo -n "$q" | jq -sRr @uri)&start=$start&end=$end&limit=200" > "$tmp"
    local n
    n=$(jq '.hits | length' "$tmp")
    if [ "$n" -lt 200 ] || [ $((end - start)) -lt 60 ]; then
        jq -c '.hits[]' "$tmp"
        rm "$tmp"
        return
    fi
    rm "$tmp"
    local mid=$(( (start + end) / 2 ))
    paged_search "$q" "$start" "$mid"
    paged_search "$q" "$mid" "$end"
}

# Usage: collect all 'memos' hits in the last 7 days
SINCE=$(date -v-7d -u +%s 2>/dev/null || date -d '7 days ago' -u +%s)
NOW=$(date -u +%s)
paged_search "memos" "$SINCE" "$NOW" > /tmp/all_hits.ndjson
wc -l /tmp/all_hits.ndjson    # raw hit count (may include boundary dups)

Boundary duplicates: the mid second may match in both halves if multiple captures share that timestamp. Dedupe by id:

jq -s 'unique_by(.document.id)' /tmp/all_hits.ndjson > /tmp/dedup.json
jq 'length' /tmp/dedup.json

In testing, a "last 24h" query for q=memos produced 2888 raw hits → 2883 unique. Boundary dup rate is small but real.

Floor: 60-second window

If a 60-second window still saturates 200 hits, the burst is too dense to enumerate (e.g. continuous scrolling capturing every 4 s = 15 captures/min × 5+ apps multiplied = saturation). Stop recursion there and report: "this minute hit the cap; the screen activity was too dense to enumerate, please narrow further".

When NOT to slice

• Casual lookup → top hits are already most relevant; no slice needed
• User said "first 10" or "best match" → respect that intent, don't expand
• Truncation in a query that already has tight time + app filters → suggest different keywords instead of slicing

How to interpret results

Order matters — hybrid_search ranks by reciprocal rank fusion of FTS (weight 0.7) + vector embedding similarity (0.3). The top hit is most likely the right one for direct lookups; for "find all" queries, walk all hits.

Per hit, extract the human-readable summary. Save to a tmp file first to keep the jq filter readable:

curl -s 'http://127.0.0.1:8839/api/search?q=mastra&limit=10' > /tmp/hits.json

# Per-hit one-liner: timestamp + app + topic + truncated 'what'
jq -r '.hits[].document |
       "\(.file_created_at)  \([.metadata_entries[]
                               | select(.key | startswith("structured_vlm"))
                               | .value.primary
                               | "app=\(.app // "?")  topic=\(.title_or_topic // "?")  what=\((.what // "?")[0:80])"][0])"' /tmp/hits.json

Sample output (verified):

2026-04-30T01:35:21Z  app=Google Chrome  topic=mastra roadmap  what=在 Google 搜索框中输入并搜索 'mastra roadmap'
2026-04-30T01:35:26Z  app=Google Chrome  topic=mastra roadmap  what=在 Google 搜索框中输入并搜索 'mastra roadmap'
2026-05-03T13:03:00Z  app=iTerm2         topic=Agent 检索       what=在终端内运行 Claude Code 进行代码开发...

primary.what is in the user's interface language (Chinese for Chinese-locale machines). Don't translate unless asked — show it as-is.

Timestamp is file_created_at (ISO 8601 UTC). Convert to user-local for display.

Returning clickable URLs to the user

After every search, return both:

1. One search-page URL — same query in the browser, so the user can browse all matches visually
2. One entity URL per cited hit — so the user can click to verify a specific screenshot in context

Building the search-page URL

Mirror the API params, URL-encoded. Always include both q and submitted_q with the same value — q populates the search input, submitted_q activates the facet sidebar with the right counts. Sharing only q leaves the facets blank until the user hits Enter.

app_names and library_ids use repeated-key style in the web URL (&app_names=A&app_names=B); but the route's z.array(z.coerce.number()) schema also accepts comma-separated.

# Build a search-page URL for a query
QUERY="mastra roadmap"
SINCE=1746230400
NOW=1746834400
APPS="Google Chrome"

python3 -c "
import urllib.parse
q   = urllib.parse.quote('$QUERY')
app = urllib.parse.quote('$APPS')
print(f'http://127.0.0.1:8839/?q={q}&submitted_q={q}&start=$SINCE&end=$NOW&app_names={app}')
"
# → http://127.0.0.1:8839/?q=mastra%20roadmap&submitted_q=mastra%20roadmap&start=1746230400&end=1746834400&app_names=Google%20Chrome

Building per-entity URLs

ENTITY_ID=1646223
echo "http://127.0.0.1:8839/entities/$ENTITY_ID"

Standard reply format

When the user asks "find X", reply in roughly this shape:

Found **3 of 47 matches** for **mastra roadmap** in the last 7 days:

1. **2026-04-30 09:35 (Google Chrome)** — Searching "mastra roadmap" in Google
   → http://127.0.0.1:8839/entities/1634834

2. **2026-04-30 09:35 (Google Chrome)** — Same search, second frame
   → http://127.0.0.1:8839/entities/1634835

3. **2026-05-03 21:03 (iTerm2)** — Claude Code session discussing agent retrieval for the Mastra livestream
   → http://127.0.0.1:8839/entities/1643716

[See all in browser](http://127.0.0.1:8839/?q=mastra%20roadmap&submitted_q=mastra%20roadmap&start=1746230400&end=1746834400)

Always include the [See all in browser](...) link, even when there's only 1 hit — it lets the user re-run the query and tweak filters without going through you. Always include the per-hit entities/<id> URL because clicking it opens the full-resolution screenshot with surrounding metadata, far richer than what you can fit in a CLI reply.

Show found when it exceeds returned hits (e.g. "3 of 47 matches"), so the user knows there's more to browse. If found == len(hits), just say "Found 3 hits ..." without the total. out_of is collection size (matches Typesense semantics) — surface it only when the user asks "how many screenshots do I have total?" or similar dataset-level questions.

For paginated/sliced results (the paged_search recipe earlier), still link to the unsliced search page URL — the user wants to browse, not to see your slicing internals.

Detecting + filling structured_vlm gaps

Why this matters: search quality depends on the structured_vlm_v1_* metadata field on each entity. That field is what holds primary.app / primary.what / primary.workspace — the LLM-readable summary that makes "find Mastra roadmap" work even when "Mastra" isn't visible in the OCR text. Entities lacking this field only have OCR; their search relevance is much lower.

Two sources of gaps:

1. Pre-rollout entities: screenshots captured before structured_vlm was running on the user's machine. Easy to recognize — entire days will be 100% missing.
2. Transient failures: VLM endpoint was down / rate-limited / image broken. Sparse — typically <1% of a day.

The plugin pipeline is idempotent and re-runnable, so backfilling is safe.

Step 1 — Discover the structured_vlm plugin id

curl -s http://127.0.0.1:8839/api/plugins | jq '.[] | select(.name == "builtin_structured_vlm") | .id'
# → 3   (varies per install)

Step 2 — Find the library + folder for the screenshots dir

A user can have multiple libraries (test imports, archives). The "live" one is named per default_library in config:

DEFAULT_LIB_NAME=$(curl -s http://127.0.0.1:8839/api/config | jq -r '.default_library')
curl -s http://127.0.0.1:8839/api/libraries \
  | jq --arg n "$DEFAULT_LIB_NAME" '.[] | select(.name == $n) | {id, folders: [.folders[] | {id, path}]}'
# → {"id": 6, "folders": [{"id": 14, "path": "/Users/.../.memos/screenshots"}]}

Capture LIB and FOLDER ids and the screenshots_root path for use below.

Step 3 — Gap audit per day

Walk a day's entities, count those missing structured_vlm in plugin_status. Use a tmp dir for the JSON bodies (same control-char gotcha as in pagination).

LIB=6; FOLDER=14; PLUGIN=3
SCREENSHOTS_ROOT="$HOME/.memos/screenshots"
DAY=20260401
TMPDIR=$(mktemp -d)

audit_day() {
    local day="$1"
    local has=0 miss=0 offset=0
    while :; do
        curl -s "http://127.0.0.1:8839/api/libraries/$LIB/folders/$FOLDER/entities?limit=400&offset=$offset&path_prefix=$SCREENSHOTS_ROOT/$day" > "$TMPDIR/batch.json"
        local n
        n=$(jq 'length' "$TMPDIR/batch.json")
        [ "$n" -eq 0 ] && break
        local h
        h=$(jq "[.[] | select(.plugin_status | map(.plugin_id) | index($PLUGIN))] | length" "$TMPDIR/batch.json")
        has=$((has + h))
        miss=$((miss + n - h))
        offset=$((offset + n))
        [ "$n" -lt 400 ] && break
    done
    echo "$day total=$((has + miss)) has=$has missing=$miss"
}

audit_day "$DAY"
# Sample real output:
#   20260101 total=2051 has=0    missing=2051   ← all pre-rollout
#   20260401 total=3817 has=3783 missing=34     ← post-rollout, transient gaps
#   20260424 total=3835 has=3835 missing=0      ← clean

rm -rf "$TMPDIR"

To audit a range of days, just loop:

for d in 20260401 20260402 20260403; do audit_day "$d"; done

Step 4 — List the missing entity ids on a day (optional)

If the user wants to know exactly which entities are missing:

LIB=6; FOLDER=14; PLUGIN=3
DAY=20260401
TMPDIR=$(mktemp -d)
> "$TMPDIR/missing.txt"
offset=0
while :; do
    curl -s "http://127.0.0.1:8839/api/libraries/$LIB/folders/$FOLDER/entities?limit=400&offset=$offset&path_prefix=$HOME/.memos/screenshots/$DAY" > "$TMPDIR/batch.json"
    n=$(jq 'length' "$TMPDIR/batch.json")
    [ "$n" -eq 0 ] && break
    jq -r ".[] | select((.plugin_status | map(.plugin_id) | index($PLUGIN)) == null) | \"\(.id) \(.filepath)\"" "$TMPDIR/batch.json" >> "$TMPDIR/missing.txt"
    offset=$((offset + n))
    [ "$n" -lt 400 ] && break
done
wc -l "$TMPDIR/missing.txt"
head "$TMPDIR/missing.txt"

Step 5 — Run scan to fill gaps

memos scan <PATH> --plugin <PLUGIN_ID> walks the directory, checks each file's plugin_status, and triggers the structured_vlm webhook only for entities missing that plugin (idempotent — already-processed entities are skipped).

# Backfill one day's structured_vlm
memos scan "$HOME/.memos/screenshots/20260401" --plugin 3 -bs 4

-bs 4 (batch-size 4) is a good balance — high enough to keep the VLM endpoint busy, low enough to recover gracefully if a batch fails. The default -bs 1 is too slow for whole-day backfills.

Warn the user about cost first:

• A pre-rollout day with ~3000 missing entities at ~5–10 s per image = 20–60 min of VLM time, plus token cost
• For a local Ollama / vLLM endpoint, only time cost
• For a paid API, also tokens × $price/1M × 3000

Quote the estimate before running. Don't auto-trigger backfill of multiple days without explicit "yes, do all of them".

Step 6 — Verify after scan

Re-run the audit (Step 3) for the day. missing should be near 0. If it's still high, the VLM endpoint may be unreachable or returning errors — check ~/.memos/logs/ for structured_vlm failure-category lines.

When to use this proactively

• Search returned hits with weak primary.what (or no structured_vlm_v1_* metadata at all): tell the user "these look like pre-rollout / failed entities; want me to backfill the day?"
• A specific date the user keeps mentioning has no good results: audit it first, propose backfill if missing > 20%.
• The user asks "why does search miss X?": gap audit on the date they expect, often the answer.

What this skill won't auto-decide

Don't trigger backfill silently. Always show the audit numbers + cost estimate first, get explicit user confirmation, then run.

Opening a screenshot

The filepath is an absolute local path. To show the user the actual image:

# macOS
open "/Users/.../screenshots/20260423/00001.webp"

# Linux
xdg-open "/path/to/file.webp"

# Windows (PowerShell)
Start-Process "C:\path\to\file.webp"

Don't open more than 2-3 at a time — overwhelming. Pick the top hit, show its timestamp + primary.what, and ask if user wants more.

Common pitfalls

1. Empty q="" returns recent files unranked — that's crud.list_entities behavior, not search. If user says "find the latest X", do q=X not q="".
2. file_type_group='image' is hardcoded server-side — the index only contains screenshots. Don't expect to find logs / docs.
3. active_app is the OS-reported app, not the logical product. iTerm2 running Claude Code reports active_app=iTerm2. The logical product (e.g. "Claude Code") lives in structured_vlm.primary.app. So:
   • To find "any iTerm2 screenshots": app_names=iTerm2
   • To find "Claude Code sessions": prefer q=Claude+Code (FTS hits structured_vlm metadata) over app_names.
4. Spinner artifacts: Claude Code's window title cycles ✳, ⠐, etc. Don't include spinner glyphs in q. Just use the task description text.
5. Unicode in q: URL-encode Chinese / emoji properly. curl --data-urlencode 'q=...' -G ... is safest.
6. Rate limit: there isn't one, but each query also hits the embedding model for vector search. Don't burst > 20 queries in a tight loop without batching.
7. Old data without VLM: screenshots predating structured_vlm rollout (or where VLM failed) only have OCR text. Their hits will lack the structured_vlm_v1_* entry — fall back to ocr_result for context.
8. ocr_result is not in search hits — it's stripped from /api/search responses to keep them small (the full payload is ~15 KB per entry × 48 hits). The other metadata (timestamp, active_app, active_window, url, structured_vlm_*) is intact. If you genuinely need the OCR text for a specific entity, fetch /api/entities/{id} directly.
9. Chinese FTS noise is real: the PG index uses jieba word segmentation, so a multi-character Chinese phrase gets split into smaller tokens. Common single-character morphemes (网 / 站 / 中 etc.) match a lot of unrelated OCR (网络 / 网站 / 网址), so FTS will surface low-relevance hits mixed with the real ones. Hybrid RRF mitigates this somewhat via vector search, but for Chinese brand / site names always cross-check hits with URL or active_app filters (see Strategy 0) — don't trust the FTS rank alone.

When to give up and ask

• 0 hits: try variations (synonyms, broader date range, drop app_names). After 3 variations, ask user for more context ("do you remember which app?").
• found > limit: see "Handling large result sets" above. Default action depends on user intent — narrow query for casual lookup, time-slice for comprehensive scans. (P1 will add an offset parameter so the time-slice recipe can retire.)
• Server returns 5xx: server-side error, capture body, ask user to check memos logs.

What this skill does NOT do

• ❌ Aggregate stats across days (use future "memos day" / cross-day analytics tools).
• ❌ Find "everything I did on project X this week" — that needs the unfinished Activity / Session aggregation. For now, do a tight q=X + time window and let the user scrub.
• ❌ Edit / delete entities. Read-only.