vault-scout

Vault Scout

A Haiku-backed primitive for mechanical Obsidian-vault exploration. The main agent calls this skill when it needs a structured answer to a search/listing/frontmatter question without polluting its own context with dozens of file reads.

Why this skill exists

Vault work frequently needs the same kind of mechanical sweep:

• "Find every NPC linked to a given faction"
• "List all notes under Sessions/Session N/ and their frontmatter types"
• "Grep for [[Note Name]] across Locations/ and show which notes reference it"
• "Read these 12 location notes and tell me which ones have no discovery: field"

These tasks are pattern-match + read + tabulate. No creative judgment, no prose generation. Letting the main Opus agent run them is wasteful: the main agent pays Opus prices for Haiku-grade work, and its context fills up with file contents it doesn't need beyond the tabulation.

vault-scout dispatches a Haiku subagent with the narrow question, lets Haiku do the scanning in its own context, and receives back a clean tabular or bulleted answer.

When to use

• The task is find X / list Y / read frontmatter and tabulate / grep for pattern Z.
• The answer is a table, bulleted list, or short structured summary — not prose, not creative content.
• The work involves reading many files (≥5) or running pattern searches that would otherwise pollute main-agent context.
• The rules for the task are fully determined by the request (no judgment calls beyond "does this match?").

When NOT to use

• Creative work — NPC psychology, location design, scene architecture, prose writing. Main Opus owns these.
• Single-file reads — one file, small, go direct. Dispatch overhead (~200 Opus tokens to write the prompt + ~80 Opus tokens to read the result) exceeds the work.
• Mentions or sections of one note: vault_mentions, vault_read_note and vault_read_section return just those parts in the main context, so there is nothing to offload.
• Simple Bash ops — file renames, git mv, mkdir. Main agent Bash is faster and cheaper.
• Synthesis across sources — if the answer requires combining vault content with sourcebook content, that's a worldbuilding task. Use worldbuilding or related skills.
• Tasks needing taste/judgment — "which NPC would work best for Session N?" is creative. Main Opus.