A knowledge vault is a folder of plain Markdown notes with typed frontmatter, explicit links, and a machine-checkable schema. It compounds when it is atomic, sourced, and audited; it rots when it becomes a folder of long documents nobody links. These pages cover the architecture, the orchestration loop that agents run against it, and the audit gates that keep it honest.
Architecture
- vault-architecture: Numbered folder tree, note types scoped to the work, a spec file as the source of truth, and generation over hand-building.
- atomic-notes: One idea per note, titles written as claims, 100 to 500 words, three to seven outbound links, deliberate status promotion.
- vault-frontmatter-schema: Per-type required fields, empty arrays over missing keys, framework schema extensions, and pruning fields nobody queries.
- linking-and-tags: Links carry meaning, tags carry state, every link explained in prose, block references for citing paragraphs, MOCs grown from clusters.
- rigor-frameworks: Map the domain to a rigor framework (MECE, ADR, IRAC, claim-evidence-counter, and the rest), layer frameworks, or compose one from primitives.
Evidence and decisions
- source-verification: One source note per work, every empirical claim linked to it, verification dates that expire, and the corroboration gate before anything is publishable.
- decision-journals: Journal at decision time, keep the pre-decision section immutable, record alternatives and driving atoms, review by class.
Operations
- vault-orchestration: The capture, extract, link, audit loop an agent runs against a vault, the handoff at each stage, and the guardrails on bulk writes.
- vault-sub-prompts: The fixed, versioned prompts the loop reuses, each with an input and output contract: extraction, map emergence, atomicity, links, contradictions, triage, pre-mortem.
- vault-audit: The deterministic auditor, spec-driven configuration, root-cause triage, the scope freeze before bulk changes, and the re-run delta.
- audit-rule-catalog: Every rule id with its severity and bucket, the M000 meta rule, severity overrides in the spec, and the mechanical tier autofix may repair.
- semantic-audit: The fixed-rubric LLM judge for defects code cannot detect, evidence-gated verdicts, and run-over-run comparison.
- vault-maintenance: Weekly, monthly, and quarterly review protocols, Dataview quality gates, and the maintenance budget as a design constraint.
- vault-evolution: Add, deprecate, migrate; never rebuild. The four moves that grow a vault without severing its link network.
- vault-schema-migration: Make a field newly required the way a database adds a column: auditor-generated worklist, scope-frozen backfill, no fabricated values, re-run as proof.
- team-vaults: Git as the sync substrate, designing merge conflicts out, one naming authority, communal atoms and owned decisions.
- vault-pull-request-review: Branch per session, the auditor as the merge check mapped to the review scale, human review for the semantic tier, squash atoms but keep decision history.
How-to
- bootstrap-a-research-vault: Generate a vault from a spec with the vault-architect scripts, run the auditor, close the autofix loop, and assemble the semantic bundle.