ms — metaskill search/load engine

ms — meta_skill search/load engine

Core Insight: ms is the skill-search engine over both configured corpora (agentops + jsm). Consume via MCP, write/admin via CLI. One law: after ANY reindex/wipe, every running ms mcp serve MUST be killed (sessions respawn fresh). A surviving server silently reads pre-wipe data and returns recorded:true on writes that land in orphaned files.

Constraints

• Load with full: true or --full when the intent is to execute a skill, because metadata cards and packed overviews omit runnable guidance.
• Keep the consume/write boundary explicit: use MCP for search and load, but use the CLI for feedback and outcomes because only CLI writes are verified to land in the live database.
• When attached mcp__ms__* tools are unavailable, use the skill-local one-shot MCP helper for search. A zero-result ms search CLI response is not evidence that MCP BM25 found no match and must not silently substitute for it.
• Reindex only through scripts/ms-reindex.sh, because it sweeps stale servers and proves source equivalence after rebuilding the index.
• Treat the local index as disposable state, not a source of truth; the non-goal is editing indexed content instead of skills/**.
• Keep ms retrieval-only for production skill work. It returns search and load results; the caller owns authoring, validation, and every subsequent decision.

Session evidence and instruction changes

For a requested instruction-improvement task, use CASS to discover relevant episodes and ms to find existing guidance that could explain the behavior or already address it. Load only the relevant skills, then inspect their canonical source before proposing an edit. An AGENTS.md or task-prompt change does not require inventing a skill or loading an unrelated one.

Upstream MS also offers build --from-cass; this adapter deliberately does not invoke that authoring path. Inspect ms build --help if the caller selects it separately. A generated skill, search rank, repeated prompt, or recorded outcome is not proof of downstream improvement.

CASS search/pack supplies candidate evidence. Use AO's bounded excerpt view only when the investigation needs exact raw spans, literal fields or instruction identity that the selected CASS output does not establish. These are optional capabilities, not a required sequence on every task. The caller owns a supported candidate edit or no-change judgment, independent review and later usefulness testing; retrieval never awards that outcome itself.

Quick Start

Find a skill (MCP-primary — BM25, currently strictly better than CLI search), then load the FULL runnable SKILL.md in one call (always full: true when you mean to use it):