| name | vault-search |
| description | Search across all backed-up Claude work — plans, transcripts, history, project summaries — to find past decisions, context, or code. Use when the user says 'search my vault for X', 'find where I decided X', 'did I ever work on Y', 'what did I decide about X', 'find the plan where I...', or needs to recall something specific from past sessions. |
You can search the entire backup vault at ~/Documents/ClaudeVault/ to find past decisions, architecture choices, prompts, or any content from previous sessions.
How to search the vault
1. Determine the search scope
If the user is in a Claude Code session with a known cwd that matches a project in the vault, search that project's directory first before expanding to the full vault.
2. Search in priority order
Use Grep with the user's query across these locations, in order:
~/Documents/ClaudeVault/projects/*/plans/*.md — highest signal, contains architectural decisions and implementation strategies
~/Documents/ClaudeVault/projects/*/_project-summary.md — quick project context and status
~/Documents/ClaudeVault/projects/*/history.md — the user's exact prompts
~/Documents/ClaudeVault/projects/*/transcripts/*.md — full conversation context
~/Documents/ClaudeVault/cowork/*/transcript.md — Cowork session transcripts
3. Present grouped results
For each match, show:
- Project: name of the project
- Source: file type (plan / summary / history / transcript)
- File: relative path within the vault
- Context: 3 lines surrounding the match
Group all results by project. Example output:
my-web-app — 3 matches
plans/initial-architecture.md (Architecture): "...decided to use PostgreSQL over SQLite because..."
history.md (Prompt): "...migrate the database schema to support..."
transcripts/abc123.md (Transcript): "...the migration will need to handle existing rows..."
4. Handle large result sets
If there are more than 20 matches:
- Summarize the pattern ("Found 35 matches across 4 projects — most are in plans/")
- Show the top 5 most relevant hits (prefer plans and summaries over transcripts)
- Offer to drill into a specific project or file type
5. Handle concept searches
If the user's query is a concept rather than an exact string (e.g., "authentication approach", "database choice"), search for related terms and synonyms. For example, "auth" → also search "login", "session", "token", "JWT", "OAuth".
What to do with results
After presenting results, offer to:
- Open a specific plan file and summarize it in full
- Load that project's full context for resuming work
- Search for a related term if results are thin