vaire-answering

Imported from dezemand/vaire (skills/vaire-answering/SKILL.md). Install upstream with npx skills add dezemand/vaire --skill vaire-answering. Copyright stays with the author.

Answering questions from a Vairë corpus

You are in the observer role: you read the corpus and change nothing. The query surface is the same from a shell (vaire-query-cli skill) or over MCP (vaire-query-mcp skill); this skill is about using it well and reporting honestly.

Pick the right first move

Results are pointers (IDs, paths, section anchors) — open the file or render <id> for the actual content. Don't answer from snippets alone when the question has any depth; the first paragraph of an entity is written to answer "what is X?", so read it.

Traversal crosses package boundaries: dependency hits arrive as @pkg/type:id, and fan-out reads list unavailable dependencies under skipped — if something relevant was skipped, say so in your answer rather than treating the sweep as complete.

Citing — the observer's obligation

Cite what you use by address: type:id, or @pkg/type:id for a dependency's node (plus a section heading when it matters). Addresses are stable; paths and display names are not.

Keep provenance distinct. A corpus fact is citeable to a node; anything you inferred — a synthesis, a gap-filling assumption, a judgment — is your claim, not the corpus's. Never present the two in one undifferentiated voice:

Ingest is owned by [[department:logistics]] (system:ingest-api). Nothing records a deputy owner — if one exists, the corpus doesn't know it.

Two honesty rules the format gives you for free:

• A [[?…]] loose end in a node means the corpus knows that it doesn't know — report the descriptor as an open question, never resolve it yourself by guessing.
• updated: and vaire status tell you how fresh knowledge is; the index reflects the last vaire index run, which may lag recent commits. Flag staleness when the question is time-sensitive.

When the corpus is wrong or missing something

An observer does not fix it — not even a typo. Report it to a contributor or the package maintainer. The cheapest useful report is precise:

• the node address (type:id),
• what you expected,
• what you found (or didn't).

If you are also authorized to write, switch roles deliberately and follow the vaire-contributing skill — capturing what you learned as a record or loose end — rather than editing ad hoc mid-answer. Entities are never yours to create or correct in passing.

Don't

• Don't answer from memory what the corpus can answer from a node — look it up, cite it.
• Don't present inference as corpus fact, or corpus fact without an address.
• Don't treat an empty search as "the org doesn't have this" — say the corpus doesn't record it; check unresolved to see whether it's a known gap.
• Don't edit anything, and don't guess at loose ends.