using-cortexlisted

# Using Cortex — When to Consult the Vault The cortex vault is the user's own knowledge base: distilled Notes, Projects, and Raw session records. This skill decides **when** consulting it is warranted, and hands the actual search to the `cortex-query` skill. Retrieval is worth doing when there is a concrete signal that prior context exists. It is not worth doing on speculation — an unprompted search costs the user tokens and latency, and surfacing unrelated notes pollutes the answer. ## Search the vault when any of these is true 1. **Explicit request.** The user asks for it: "check cortex", "查一下 cortex", "有沒有記錄過", "do I have notes on this". 2. **Reference to prior work.** The user points at something earlier: "之前那個", "上次的", "我記得有", "我們討論��", "that ticket", "the project we set up", "continue where we left off". 3. **Listed topic.** The request names a topic that the SessionStart hook actually listed for this vault. The list is authoritative — match against what it showed, not against a guess about what might exist. 4. **Resuming a session.** The user asks to pick up, continue, or hand off work from a previous session. In each case, invoke the `cortex-query` skill rather than searching the vault directly — that skill knows the retrieval infrastructure, including `cortex-vec` and its fallbacks. ## Do not search the vault when - The user has not given any of the four signals above. A question being difficult, technical, or open-ended is **not** a signal