knowledge-retrieval

knowledge-retrieval is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from JakubMikolajek/codex-skills-collection. It costs 94 tokens per session (1,841 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for retrieving a small, relevant set of earlier project notes from an Obsidian vault, a folder of linked Markdown notes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before planning, architecture work, implementation, or debugging when the project has a configured vault and likely prior notes.
Why use it?
It brings back decisions and patterns already recorded without loading the entire vault or rediscovering the same information.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions Codex.

Good fit Use it before planning, architecture work, implementation, or debugging when the project has a configured vault and likely prior notes.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jakubmikolajek/codex-skills-collection/knowledge-retrieval
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add JakubMikolajek/codex-skills-collection --skill knowledge-retrieval
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/JakubMikolajek/codex-skills-collection

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for knowledge-retrieval

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jakubmikolajek/codex-skills-collection/knowledge-retrieval/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jakubmikolajek/codex-skills-collection/knowledge-retrieval)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jakubmikolajek/codex-skills-collection/knowledge-retrieval"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jakubmikolajek/codex-skills-collection/knowledge-retrieval/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for knowledge-retrieval

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jakubmikolajek/codex-skills-collection/knowledge-retrieval"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jakubmikolajek/codex-skills-collection/knowledge-retrieval.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 94 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,841 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00094 $0.01841
Opus 5 $0.00047 $0.00920
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00368
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00184

Measured 12d ago against content hash f68481e992ac, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

knowledge-retrieval scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/knowledge-retrieval/SKILL.md · 148 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 148 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Knowledge Retrieval

This skill is the read side of the vault. obsidian-note writes durable knowledge; this skill retrieves it back into task context, bounded and justified, instead of either ignoring the vault entirely or dumping it wholesale into a prompt.

When to Use

  • Before architecture-design or /plan, when the project has an established vault with _index.md/_context.md already populated
  • Before implementing something that plausibly has prior art in the vault (a pattern, a playbook, an ADR that already decided this trade-off)
  • When a debug task's symptom resembles something in 04-debug/ or 03-skills/playbooks/

When NOT to Use

  • No vault configured yet (_codex-config.md missing) — nothing to retrieve
  • Purely trivial task with no plausible prior art
  • The task already has an explicit, sufficient context (don't re-fetch what's already in hand)

Core Principle: Bounded, Justified, Degradable

  • Bounded: return 3-7 notes/snippets within an explicit token budget (default: treat ~1500 tokens of note content as the ceiling for a normal task; state the number used when it differs). Never return "everything that matched" — rank and cut.
  • Justified: every note in the pack gets one line saying why it was selected. A context pack with unexplained inclusions is not trustworthy enough to hand to an implementer.
  • Degradable: this skill must work with nothing more than the filesystem and grep/keyword search. Treat semantic ranking as an enhancement layered on top when available, never a precondition for functioning at all.

Retrieval Process

Knowledge Retrieval progress:
- [ ] Step 1: Read the project's _context.md and _index.md
- [ ] Step 2: Gather candidates
- [ ] Step 3: Rank candidates
- [ ] Step 4: Cut to budget
- [ ] Step 5: Return the context pack with reasons

Step 1: Read _context.md and _index.md first

These are the cheapest, highest-value reads — _context.md (see obsidian-note's references/context-file.md) already summarizes current state, constraints, and known traps. Read them before anything else; they may already answer the question without needing a single additional note.

Read the full file on GitHub · 148 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 148 lines · 94 tokens per session scan A f68481e992ac

Subscribe to this mod's changes

knowledge-retrieval is a skill published in the GitHub repository JakubMikolajek/codex-skills-collection (5 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 94 tokens to every session and 1,841 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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