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Vault house rules. Before acting, read $TARS_HOME/AGENTS.md if it exists and honor it — per-vault rules there (source allowlists, tone, privacy, output layout) override this skill's defaults on conflict.

Cheap first, escalate only when needed — a full document is the last resort, never the default (one meeting capture can be ~30k tokens).

1. Hub check: if a wiki/concepts/ page matches the topic, its ## Notes and ## Sources lists are a curated map of the best material.
2. Search with chunks: tars search "<query>" -v --json — each hit carries its best-matching chunk verbatim (~400 tokens), which often already holds the answer. Try 2–3 phrasings if the first is thin (different vocabulary, entity names, ticket keys); --connector narrows.
3. Escalate per document, not per question — only when a hit's chunk isn't enough:
   • tars show <doc_id> --grep "<term>" -C 5 — the lines around every match (numbered, so you can re-aim with a wider -C).
   • tars show <doc_id> --head 40 — frontmatter + opening (a meeting's Notes panel sits at the top).
   • Full tars show <doc_id> only when the answer genuinely needs the whole document. Also grep wiki/notes/ — promoted insights outrank raw captures when they conflict.
4. Log vocabulary misses. If the first phrasing found nothing useful and a reformulation did — the idea was in the corpus under different words — append one line to retrieval-misses.md at the vault root: - <YYYY-MM-DD> · asked: "<original phrasing>" · found via: "<phrasing that worked>". Don't log corpus gaps (the answer truly isn't there) or typos — only vocabulary mismatches. This file is the trigger instrument for semantic search: it gets built when the data says lexical search fails too often, not before.
5. Synthesize the answer only from what the corpus supports, citing each claim with its doc id and origin (URL / path / ticket). If the corpus doesn't contain the answer, say so plainly — never fill gaps silently.
6. If the answer surfaced a durable insight (a decision, a rationale, a concept worth keeping), offer to promote it — see the promote skill.