NeMo Retriever MCP

SkillSearch

Lets your agent search a document collection and pull in new files to answer questions with cited evidence.

Then ask your AI: use the NeMo Retriever MCP skill

Details

Instructions available. Your AI can read the instructions. Execution depends on the setup they require.

Add it as a step in a pipeline you build on Ahel, or connect Ahel to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude Code or Codex and ask your AI to use it.

About this skill

Use when a task needs to search or add documents through NeMo Retriever MCP.

What this skill tells your AI

The instructions your AI receives, as published by nvidia/skills in skills/nemo-retriever-mcp/SKILL.md and read by Ahel’s review.

Use the NeMo Retriever MCP tools exposed under retriever instead of the retriever CLI.

The server exposes MCP tools, not MCP resources. Do not call list_mcp_resources to discover documents or decide whether Retriever is available; an empty MCP resource list is expected.

Workflow

  • Use query to search documents already available to Retriever.
  • Never ingest documents that are already searchable, including documents in a prebuilt index.
  • Use ingest_documents only when required documents are not yet searchable and server-readable paths are explicitly available. Do not assume that paths visible to the agent are also readable by the Retriever server.
  • After ingestion completes, use query to retrieve evidence from the added documents.
  • Start with top_k=5 and format="hits". Request more only when the first successful response does not contain enough evidence to answer the task.
  • Read evidence hits from the tool response and ground your answer in them.
  • Preserve available document identifiers such as document_id, source_id, or pdf_basename, along with page numbers, when the task requests citations or structured output.
  • If query fails, inspect the error and retry with corrected parameters or a shorter equivalent query. If it still fails, report the error before using another retrieval method.

Signals

GitHub stars
4k
Forks
434
Last commit
Oct 2026
Advanced
Item type
skill
Key
nemo-retriever-mcp
Source
github.com/nvidia/skills