| name | check-memory |
| description | Use when about to act on a topic the notes corpus may already cover, or when the user asks what memory exists about something - searches the shared notes corpus for relevant facts, with an optional per-project narrowing flag. Triggers include "check memory", "do we have a note on", "what do we know about", and any moment you are about to hand-roll something that smells previously-solved. Requires the `replica` CLI to be installed and pointed at the notes corpus. |
Check memory
The notes corpus is a shared, flat directory of one-fact-per-file markdown
notes, managed by the replica CLI (the schoen-lab replica package, part of
schoen-lab). replica memory recall
ranks the corpus against a query and returns the matching notes' names and
descriptions.
Setup
Confirm the CLI is installed before doing anything else:
command -v replica >/dev/null || { echo "replica not found - install the replica CLI before proceeding" >&2; exit 1; }
If replica is missing, tell the user and stop - do not guess at the corpus
contents from memory of past sessions.
Searching
Search the whole corpus:
replica memory recall "<topic>"
This is unscoped by default - it ranks every note in the corpus, not just
ones related to the current project. There is no automatic project detection
from the working directory today.
To narrow the search to notes explicitly tagged as relevant to one project,
pass its slug:
replica memory recall "<topic>" --project <slug>
<slug> is the project's tracked identifier (e.g. schoen-lab; check
project-tracker if one is installed and the slug is unclear).
Important caveat: --project only returns notes that carry explicit
project-affinity frontmatter (applies_to or projects), and that tagging
has not been backfilled across the existing corpus yet - most notes are
currently untagged and so are invisible to --project, by design (it fails
closed rather than guessing). A --project search returning nothing is
not evidence the corpus lacks a relevant note - re-run the unscoped
search before concluding there's nothing to find.
Reporting
Report which notes matched and what they say. If nothing matched (in either
mode), say so plainly - a silent miss is what this skill exists to prevent.
Stewardship
Recall puts notes in front of you; that is the moment maintenance happens.
If a matched note is stale, wrong, or superseded by something you just
verified, correct or delete it on the spot - edit the file (or remove it),
then commit and push the corpus - rather than leaving it for a bulk cleanup
pass. Keeping the corpus true is part of using it: many small fixes at point
of use beat scheduled sweeps, which cost far more and arrive after the bad
note has already misled someone. If a correction is too big for the current
task, say so in your report instead of silently ignoring the bad note.
