The guides · № 5 · 7 steps draft

Keeping a Vault

A vault is a personal knowledge base built from plain markdown in a git repo, structured so an agent can file, find, triage, and maintain it with you. These steps build one from scratch, one habit at a time.

Distilled from one practitioner's measured usage: logged sessions, the incidents that recurred, and the patterns that stopped them. v0. Step slugs are stable; chapters may be cut or reordered before 1.0.

The steps

Ordered by leverage-per-effort, but every step stands alone: start where it hurts. In a hurry, step 0 is the baseline in one paste.

1. 00 The one-paste vault

   Optional full-package setup: a plain-file vault with lifecycle directories, an inbox, a daily log, and a CLAUDE.md that teaches the agent the shape.

2. 01 Plain files in a repo

   Markdown in a git repo beats a notes app: agent-native, greppable, versioned, portable. Structure in filenames does the work of a database.

3. 02 Location is state

   Four lifecycle directories (inbox, active, later, archived) where moving a file IS the workflow, and the agent can read project status off the filesystem.

4. 03 Capture now, sort later

   An inbox with zero-friction capture and agent-assisted triage: getting a thought out of your head must cost nothing at the moment it happens.

5. 04 The daily log

   Append-only day notes at log/YYYY/MM/. The agent writes session summaries, and months later the log answers 'what did I decide and why.'

6. 05 Teach the agent the shape

   A CLAUDE.md at the vault root (structure, conventions, and working agreements) turns every future session from a guest into staff.

7. 06 Run a doctor

   A small script that checks vault health mechanically: broken links, naming drift, stale actives. Advisory findings the agent fixes in the same session that caused them.

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