fix: prevent intent analyzer from over-rewriting retrieval queries

openviking/prompts/templates/retrieval/intent_analysis.yaml

@@ -190,7 +190,13 @@ template: |
      - Queries should be short, specific, and retrievable
      - Avoid lengthy descriptions
 
-  5. **Priority setting**:
+  5. **Do not leak conversation transcript into query text**:
+     - Query text must stay close to the user's current message and the concrete retrieval target
+     - Do not include speaker roles, chat history summaries, review workflow narration, or multi-step task decomposition in query text
+     - Recent conversation is for disambiguation only, not for copying into the final query
+     - If the current message is already a focused search intent, prefer minimal rewrite or keep it unchanged
+
+  6. **Priority setting**:
      - 1 = Highest priority (core requirement)
      - 3 = Medium priority (helpful)
      - 5 = Lowest priority (optional)

openviking/storage/viking_fs.py

@@ -1047,6 +1047,22 @@ async def search(
                 target_abstract=target_abstract,
             )
             typed_queries = query_plan.queries
+
+            # Guardrail: keep retrieval queries semantically anchored to the current
+            # user query. Intent analysis may expand into task-planning language
+            # using recent conversation context, which hurts retrieval precision and
+            # can pollute rerank inputs with session-level narration.
+            original_query = (query or "").strip()
+            if original_query:
+                for tq in typed_queries:
+                    rewritten = (tq.query or "").strip()
+                    if not rewritten:
+                        tq.query = original_query
+                        continue
+                    token_overlap = set(original_query.lower().split()) & set(rewritten.lower().split())
+                    if len(token_overlap) < 2 and len(original_query) <= 200:
+                        tq.query = original_query
+
             # Set target_directories
             if target_uri_list:
                 for tq in typed_queries: