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 questions the system can answer itself.

Examples of the bug (anonymized):

• alice-example, her brain page already carried a role line ("Chief of Staff at acme-example") and a long meeting history → the agent still asked.
• charlie-example, a thick imported email thread whose subject lines all pointed at one shared project → the agent still asked.

When This Fires

This is a harness-routing convention, not a mechanical guarantee: route here whenever ANY of these are true,