hipocampus-search

hipocampus-search is a skill for Claude Code from kevin-hs-sohn/hipocampus. It costs 44 tokens per session (930 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A skill for searching the agent's stored memory using keyword and meaning-based search. It also checks an index first to decide whether the answer may already be known.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to retrieve earlier decisions, project history, notes, or files from persistent agent memory.
Why use it?
It helps find relevant past information without manually opening every memory file. It also guides the agent to search memory before looking outside it.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the hipocampus plugin — 5 skills, 3 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it to retrieve earlier decisions, project history, notes, or files from persistent agent memory.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/kevin-hs-sohn/hipocampus/search
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 kevin-hs-sohn/hipocampus --skill search
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kevin-hs-sohn/hipocampus

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install hipocampus, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 5 skills, 3 hooks.

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 hipocampus-search

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kevin-hs-sohn/hipocampus/search/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/kevin-hs-sohn/hipocampus/search)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kevin-hs-sohn/hipocampus/search"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kevin-hs-sohn/hipocampus/search/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 hipocampus-search

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kevin-hs-sohn/hipocampus/search"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kevin-hs-sohn/hipocampus/search.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 44 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 930 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00044 $0.00930
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.00465
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00186
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00093

Measured 13d ago against content hash 8fafde928a79, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

hipocampus-search 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 13d 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/search/SKILL.md · 98 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 98 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Quick Reference

Action Command
Hybrid search (best quality) qmd query "keyword1 keyword2"
Keyword search (fast) qmd search "keyword1 keyword2"
Vector search only qmd vsearch "semantic query"
Find files qmd search "query" --files
Read file qmd get "path/to/file.md"
Re-index qmd update

Which Search to Use

Check hipocampus.config.json:

  • search.vector: true (default) → qmd query for best results (BM25 + vector + rerank)
  • search.vector: falseqmd search for BM25 keyword search

ROOT.md — "Do I Know About This?"

memory/ROOT.md is a functional index of everything in memory, auto-loaded every session. It has four sections:

  • Active Context — current week's work and priorities (immediate situational awareness)
  • Recent Patterns — cross-cutting insights not tied to a specific time period
  • Historical Summary — high-level chronology of past periods
  • Topics Index — keyword lookup table for O(1) "do I know about X?" judgment

Before any lookup, check ROOT.md first:

  • Topic found in Topics Index → search memory (qmd or tree traversal)
  • Topic NOT in Topics Index → use external search or answer from general knowledge
  • This eliminates "loading to decide whether to load" — ROOT.md is always in context

This is the core value of the compaction tree. Search only works when you know what to search for. The Topics Index tells you what you know at a glance.

BM25 Query Construction

When using qmd search (BM25 mode), queries must be keywords, not natural language.

Rules

  1. Use 2-4 specific keywords — more precise = better results
  2. No natural language — strip filler words
  3. Try variations — if first query misses, use synonyms or related terms

Examples

Bad (natural language) Good (keywords)
"How do I configure the database?" "database config"
"What did we decide about caching?" "caching decision"

Read the full file on GitHub · 98 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. 13d ago First seen · 98 lines · 44 tokens per session scan A 8fafde928a79

Subscribe to this mod's changes

hipocampus-search is a skill published in the GitHub repository kevin-hs-sohn/hipocampus (206 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 44 tokens to every session and 930 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-08-30.

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