The Qwen3-Reranker is a web-search cross-encoder. Against conversational / personal-intent queries (e.g. 'what am I optimizing toward?') it scores every candidate as 'no', so brain_answer collapsed to 'No relevant content found' even though BM25 had retrieved on-topic notes (incl. the telos wing). Treat the reranker as a filter: when it keeps zero results, fall back to the BM25/vector ordering (capped to the no-reranker depth of 10). Refs brain#11. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>