How I work with knowledge bases: decisions anchored to code, read before the edit
This is how I work with coding agents day to day: a knowledge base that the code and the agents both answer to. I wrote the method down in enola-guides, guides 9 to 12; this is the version without the YAML. The whole practice, with the tools and a short video, is on its own page.
Decisions live next to the code they govern. A decision page names the files it governs. So any file can answer “which decision applies to me?”, and a law can require that code under a decision has its page. When the code moves and the decision does not, that is visible, not a surprise three months later.
Numbers carry their receipt. When a page says “Order has 41 dependents”, it cites the receipt the number was read from: the commit, the enola version, a fingerprint. A script can check it again. A claim nobody can re-check is a sentence, not a fact.
Findings are judged once. What the graph reports is a candidate. I check it against the code and record it in a ledger as accepted, rejected or noise, so the next session does not argue about it again.
Four moments, four hooks. The intent-first gate holds the agent’s first edit in a repository once and shows what governs the file. The turn record notes what moved. Stop-time debt holds once when code under a decision changed and the decision did not. Session refresh rebuilds the graph when the code has moved on. Each one forces a reading, never a verdict: the retry goes through, and people decide.
Skills ask at a fixed moment. A deep dive before planning, a claim check while taking in a new source, drift on a schedule, citation hygiene, and the blast radius before a change. The value is the moment, not the prompt.
When the tool is missing, say so. The wrapper under the skills prints one line and exits cleanly when enola or its config is not there. “The graph was not asked” stays different from “the graph agreed”.
I run my own work this way, and this site runs on the same idea through pi-brain. If you want it in your team, that is what I set up.