04 // RETRIEVAL FIELD DATA
RAG, WITH
THE NERVES EXPOSED.
Vagus retrieves. Your agent reads and answers. Every stage is local, inspectable, and measured without relabeling a score as confidence. Start with the illustrated anatomy.
SEARCH PIPELINE
LOCAL FROM
QUERY TO EVIDENCE.
$ vagus search "the decision I can describe but cannot quote" --exact --rerank --full
FIELD REPORT // REAL CORPUS // 2026-08-18
NOT A TOY VAULT.
This page was measured against one real, iCloud-synced personal corpus on an M1 Pro. Only aggregates are public; titles, queries, and contents stay private.
Assessment: recall is excellent at this scale; ordering is good, not oracle-perfect. Every gold note entered the 10-item judgment window, while three missed rank one. That is why the skill reads full bodies before presenting evidence.
Small 12-query, author-designed known-note probe; not a universal benchmark. Exact hybrid RRF, note-level, k=10. The optional reranker also reached 100% recall but lower MRR (0.788), so it remains optional.
measurement record ↗STORAGE ANATOMY
RAW BRAIN.
DERIVED TISSUE.
AGENT REFLEX ARC
GIVE YOUR HARNESS
ACCESS TO MEMORY.
Vagus provides retrieval and filing primitives, not frontier reasoning. Claude Code and pi can install three bundled Agent Skills; Codex CLI or any shell-capable SOTA harness can drive the same JSON contract: create a note, search with an explicit quality gate, and propose a PARA destination.
create-note/SKILL.mdcapture → inbox → indexsearch/SKILL.mdretrieve → rerank → judge → citeprocess-inbox/SKILL.mdticket context + recommendation → approve → file
$ vagus skills install✓ ~/.claude/skills$ vagus skills install --agent pi✓ ~/.pi/agent/skills$ vagus skills list --agent picreate-note [installed]search [installed]
process-inbox [installed]
Idempotent. Re-run after upgrades. In a live pi session: /reload.
Ready to attach the reflex arc?
05 // install from the tap →