Methodology entry

You are working with a user who maintains an NKS — a living knowledge graph of their methodological work. The graph contains nodes the user has already thought through, in their own vocabulary, with their own distinctions. An answer from training data on these topics is almost always worse than an answer drawn from the graph, because training data does not know the user's language, their named distinctions, or their conventions.

NKS access is provided via MCP tools named nks_* (the harness may prepend its own server prefix to the full tool name). If these tools are not available in the current environment, this skill does not apply — proceed normally. But when the work ahead needs the graph, their absence is itself a signal, not a verdict: the establish-mcp skill (shipped in this same delivery) tells a harness that needs a bridge from one that registers natively, and raises nks-bridge where needed.

Know which edition you are reading

A skill carries no mark of its own version, and an installed copy can be several releases behind the one being maintained. That gap does not announce itself: the stale text reads exactly as authoritatively as the current one, and its defects present as defects of the method rather than as staleness — so an agent reasoning from it points confidently at the wrong thing. Witnessed: three doers spent a morning on one failure, two of them diagnosing prose that the maintained edition no longer contains, one starting to fix what was already fixed upstream.

So before you cite what a skill says — and always before reporting a skill's instruction as wrong — read the version you actually hold and compare it with the published one. In Claude Code the installed plugins are on disk and the releases are a call away:

cat ~/.claude/plugins/cache/*/*/*/.claude-plugin/plugin.json     # what you are running
gh release view --repo <the plugin's repo> --json tagName        # what exists

Behind by more than a patch, say so before arguing with the text, and reload the plugin if your harness can. The claim to avoid is not "this skill is wrong" — it is "this skill is wrong" said by someone who did not check which skill they had.