---
name: vault-query
description: Deterministic vault retrieval via the brain's retrieval verbs (alexandria tool call search / vaultq_* — the brain layer's bash surface; the same tools over MCP on served brains) — the default way to search and navigate the vault before reaching for raw grep, Glob, or reading files speculatively. Six verbs — resolve (a name/email/phone → the canonical People/Knowledge/area note; ALWAYS run before creating a person/org note, it's the dedup guard), search (ranked keyword search with type/area/status/tag/since filters — the discovery verb, formerly vaultq_find), neighbors (the wikilink neighborhood of a note, N hops, in/out/both — replaces walking the graph by reading), route (content about to be filed → ranked candidate homes + a computed confidence + new-entity flags — run at the START of any ingestion/debrief/filing triage), dupes (near-duplicate detection by content+title similarity — run before creating a note that might already exist), load (a token-budgeted context pack for a note or topic — seed + area folder note + TODO lines + relevance-ranked neighbors in ONE call). Use whenever a task needs "which note is X", "where is Y mentioned", "what surrounds Z", "where does this content belong", "does this note already exist", "brief me on X", entity lookup during ingestion, or any vault search. JSON out for tool use, --pretty for humans; read-only, no API calls, sub-second. NOT for reading a note you already know (just Read it).
---

# vault-query — folder-root adapter

The real playbook lives in the brain: **`Agent/skills/vault-query.md`** (this folder
is the vault root). Read that file and follow it exactly as written, using the
shipped CLI at `.alexandria/app/.venv/bin/alexandria` wherever it says
`alexandria`, and `.alexandria/app/.venv/bin/python` for
`python -m alexandria_vault.…` entrypoints.

If `Agent/config.json` does not exist, nothing is installed yet — stop and
follow `./CLAUDE.md` (the installer) instead of this skill.
