retrieval

retrieval is a skill for Claude Code from rhoulihan/mneme. It costs 57 tokens per session (380 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A search tool for an organisation’s stored procedures, facts, and other internal knowledge. It searches the mneme index using broad terms and can show when that index may be out of date.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to find procedures, system constraints, known pitfalls, or related skills and facts. It also supports read-only database lookups and rebuilding a stale index.
Why use it?
It helps you check whether the organisation has already solved a problem before designing something from scratch. It also reduces the risk of treating an empty or old search result as proof that no guidance exists.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: $CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT variable.

Runs only inside its plugin — its command needs a path that Claude Code sets for a plugin’s own hooks and for nothing else. Install the plugin, not this.

Part of the mneme plugin — 11 skills, 3 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it to find procedures, system constraints, known pitfalls, or related skills and facts. It also supports read-only database lookups and rebuilding a stale index.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add rhoulihan/mneme
Claude Code
/plugin install mneme

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install mneme, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 11 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 retrieval

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rhoulihan/mneme/retrieval.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/rhoulihan/mneme/retrieval)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rhoulihan/mneme/retrieval"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rhoulihan/mneme/retrieval.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 57 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 380 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 $0.00057 $0.00380
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00190
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00076
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00038

Measured 7d ago against content hash ccc9e137b638, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

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 7d 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/retrieval/SKILL.md · 14 lines

What it actually says

Before reinventing, check what the organization already knows.

  1. Resolve the binary: "$CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT/bin/mneme" if CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT is set, else bin/mneme.
  2. Run mneme search "<a few words describing the need>" — terms are OR-matched and ranked, so cast wide. Filter with --kind skill or --kind fact and --plugin <name> when the target is known.
  3. Top hits are entry points: skills route onward through their own SKILL.md; facts carry their category, tags, and verified date. For structured lookups use mneme db query "SELECT ... FROM units WHERE ..." (read-only).
  4. Read stderr, not just the hits. A warning: index is stale for <repos> line means the corpus predates a merge, a pull, or an edit — so a thin or empty result may be the index rather than the organisation. Say so before concluding nobody knows this, run mneme index rebuild --stale, and search again; the second answer is the one to rely on.
  5. If the index is not built (index not built on stderr), fall back to reading the registered plugins' files directly — mneme registry list shows their paths — and suggest mneme db enable to the user once.
  6. If retrieved knowledge turns out wrong or stale, flag it: mneme flag --kind knowledge-issue "<what is wrong>".
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. 7d ago First seen · 14 lines · 57 tokens per session scan A ccc9e137b638

Subscribe to this mod's changes

retrieval is a skill published in the GitHub repository rhoulihan/mneme (6 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 57 tokens to every session and 380 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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