query

Skill: Query

You were invoked by the orchestrator because the user asked a question about the domain. Your job is to answer from the wiki — not from memory. Every claim in your answer must trace back to a wiki page, which traces back to a source in raw/.

Follow every step in order.

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Step 1 — Understand the question

Before opening any file, restate the question in your own words and identify:

• Scope: is this asking about a concept, an entity, a comparison, a contradiction, or an open question?
• Expected wiki coverage: based on wiki/index.md, do you expect this to be well-covered, partially covered, or potentially a gap?

Do not answer yet. Do not open wiki pages yet. Just think aloud in one short paragraph, then proceed.

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Step 2 — Find relevant pages

Read wiki/index.md. Identify every page that is likely relevant to the question. List them before opening any:

Relevant pages:
- concepts/self-attention (directly relevant)
- concepts/transformer (context)
- entities/vaswani-ashish (author context)
- sources/attention-is-all-you-need (primary source)

If wiki/index.md does not exist or is empty, tell the user the wiki has no content yet and stop. Suggest running an ingest first.

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Step 3 — Read the pages

Read each page from the list in Step 2. If a page links to other pages via [[wikilinks]] that seem relevant, follow those links too — but cap at 2 levels of depth to avoid sprawl.

As you read, track:

• Which pages have strong, direct answers.
• Which pages have partial or indirect answers.
• Where pages contradict each other (flagged with > [!contradiction]).
• What the wiki explicitly does not cover — genuine gaps, not just your knowledge.

Do not synthesize yet. Just read and take stock.

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Step 4 — Answer from the wiki

Write your answer. Rules:

Cite every claim. After each claim, reference the wiki page it came from using [[wikilinks]]. If a claim is supported by multiple pages, cite all of them.

Self-attention allows each token to attend to all others in the sequence
[[concepts/self-attention]], which differs from the recurrent approach
used in earlier architectures [[concepts/rnn]].

Surface contradictions explicitly. If wiki pages disagree on something relevant to the question, say so. Do not pick a side — report both positions and cite both pages.

Note: [[sources/paper-a]] and [[sources/paper-b]] disagree on whether
this scales to sequences longer than 4096 tokens. This is an open
tension in the wiki.

Flag gaps honestly. If the wiki does not cover something relevant to the question, say so explicitly rather than filling in from memory.

The wiki does not yet have coverage on mixture-of-experts variants.
Consider ingesting a source on this if it is relevant to your work.

Do not hallucinate sources. If you are tempted to cite something not in the wiki, do not. Write "not in wiki" instead.

Length: match the depth of the question. A factual lookup gets a paragraph. A synthesis question gets structured sections. A comparison question gets a side-by-side if useful.

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Step 5 — Offer to file the answer

After answering, ask:

Want me to save this as a wiki page?

If the user says yes, ask for a title if not obvious, then create wiki/concepts/<slug>.md using the concept page template from skills/ingest/SKILL.md. The page should contain the synthesized answer, with all citations intact, plus a ## Source question section at the top:

## Source question

> "Original question the user asked"
> Filed: YYYY-MM-DD

Then update wiki/index.md and wiki/log.md:

## [YYYY-MM-DD] query | Original question

Answer filed as: concepts/slug
Pages read: concepts/x, concepts/y, sources/z (N total)
Gaps identified: 1 (mixture-of-experts not covered)

If the user says no, log anyway without the "filed as" line.

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Step 6 — Suggest follow-up actions

After answering (and filing if applicable), offer one of the following if relevant — not all of them:

• A related question the wiki could answer well right now.
• A gap worth filling via ingest (name a specific type of source, not vague "more research").
• A lint opportunity if you noticed contradictions or orphaned pages while reading.

One suggestion max. Do not pad.

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Rules

• Never answer from memory alone. If no wiki page covers the topic, say so and stop. The wiki is the source of truth, not your training data.
• Never open files in raw/. Query operates only on wiki/. If the user wants raw source content, suggest ingest.
• Never modify wiki pages while answering, except when explicitly filing the answer in Step 5. Reading is read-only.
• Never invent wiki pages. If you reference a page that does not exist in wiki/index.md, correct yourself.
• If the index is large (100+ pages), do not read every page — use the index categories and page summaries to narrow down before opening files.
• If the question is ambiguous, ask one clarifying question before proceeding to Step 2. One question, not a list.