The shared source of truth

A knowledge base earns agent attention when it is authoritative, current, and cheap to retrieve. It loses attention the first time an agent follows stale advice into a broken build.

Content that compounds

• Decisions with their reasons. "We use pnpm because npm workspaces broke our postinstall order" prevents relitigating the choice every quarter.
• Non-obvious constraints. Generated-code boundaries, migration rules, environments where tests are flaky by design.
• Conventions with examples. One correct example beats three paragraphs of prose. Agents imitate; they do not infer taste from adjectives.
• Verification metadata. Who confirmed this, and when. Undated knowledge decays silently; dated knowledge announces its own staleness.

Properties that make it work

1. Versioned. Yesterday's wrong answer should be visible as history, not silently overwritten.
2. Addressable. Every statement has a stable link an agent can cite, so a human can audit exactly what the agent read.
3. Bounded. Retrieval returns the smallest passage that answers the question, not the whole corpus.

Markdown with structured frontmatter - the Open Knowledge Format approach - covers all three while staying readable in any editor.