Resolve Before Asking — Exhaust the Brain Before Bothering the User
Convention: see conventions/brain-first.md for the base lookup chain (search → query → get_page → external APIs). This skill extends that chain one hop further, to the human boundary: asking the user is the LAST resort, after the brain AND external escalation, not a shortcut around them.
Convention: see _brain-filing-rules.md — pages touched by the ingest-resolution section file by primary subject (
people/,companies/).
Purpose
Never ask the user "who is X?" when the answer already exists in the brain.
The memory answers before the human is bothered — that is the product promise. This skill defines the lookup chain that runs before any entity-identification question is sent to the user, and the escalation format when asking really is justified.
The Bug This Kills
The pattern: the agent encounters an entity with a rich brain page — timeline entries, meeting history, an imported message archive — and instead of reading them, asks the user "who is X?". This is lazy escalation. It spends the user's attention on …
