A folder of text files where Claude keeps what you tell it —suppliers, contracts, accounts, decisions, open items—, each fact with its date and its source, and which warns you about what is about to expire and what does not add up.
Everyone builds their own base, with their own topics. These eleven are examples we have already worked through: when you paste the initial prompt, Claude offers them, asks whether any of them fits you and what other topics you want to keep. Keep several, none, or start with your own.
Who is who and what each one does.
"Who handles our support for X?"
Dates, notice periods and renewals.
"What expires in six months?"
Each one linked to its contract.
"What are we paying with no contract?"
Lines, planned and actual, checked against contracts.
"Which lines go up, and why?"
Every card charge with its receipt.
"Which charges have no receipt?"
Address and account. Never passwords.
"Which account do we log in with?"
The renewal calendar.
"What renews this quarter?"
How each thing is done, step by step.
"How do we set up a new user?"
Status, milestones and the why.
"Why did we rule that out?"
Equipment and licenses, always dated.
"How many licenses do we have?"
How you write, what you have published and the drafts.
"Write me a draft in my style"
What pays off most is cross-checking them: an invoice with no contract, a contract with no budget line or a supplier who bills you and is not in the directory only show up when everything is in the same place. What each example sets up.
Nothing to install. You create a folder, add it to a project and paste a prompt.
Read the guide →In the terminal or in the Code tab of the desktop app. Adds its own tools and rules that enforce themselves.
Read the guide →Both build the same structure on the same folder, so you can use them together. Prefer a document to print or pass on? Download both guides in Word.
You tell Claude in the chat, with no forms. What is not written down at the time gets lost.
Without a date you cannot tell if it is out of date; without a source you cannot check it.
Each thing lives in one document, and the others link to it instead of copying it.
The documents follow the Open Knowledge Format (OKF) v0.2, an open specification from Google Cloud designed so that the same knowledge can be understood by people and by AI agents. It is deliberately minimal: Markdown files with a header, no central registry and no required tools.
Text files any editor can open, today and in ten years.
Claude reads and writes it directly, with no adapters and no database.
A change is a text diff, in git or in your cloud's version history.
It depends on no app: switch tools and take it all with you.
A base kept by an agent has to say not only what it knows, but where it knows it from and how much it is worth. OKF solves it with fields in the header; this method, with rules Claude applies to every fact.
| The question | In OKF v0.2 | In this method |
|---|---|---|
| Where does it come from? | sources | Every fact carries its proof: the original is filed and linked |
| How far can I trust it? | verified | "Signed" only with proof; what is missing is "to confirm", never made up |
| Is it still true? | stale_after | Every perishable fact is dated, and the health check looks for old ones |
| Is it current? | status | One source per topic, and a log of what changed and when |
| Does anything contradict it? | — | If two facts clash, both are noted with their source |
| Prompt | When |
|---|---|
| Initial · Cowork | Day one |
| Initial · Claude Code | Day one |
| Growth | Weeks later: generated views, cross-checks and queries |
| Hooks · Claude Code | So the rules enforce themselves |
| Handoff log | If you work from more than one computer |
Before marking something urgent, check whether it renews by itself.
If an answer took work, file it as a document.
Five minutes a week telling it what did not come up in the chat.