| name | katalyst-overview |
| description | Orientation and routing for katalyst: what it is, its model and vocabulary (projects, collections, items, schemas, checks), and which katalyst skill to use for a goal. Use when a user mentions katalyst and you need to know what it does or where to start, when content needs structure/consistency enforcement, or to pick among the katalyst task skills. Does no task work itself — it routes. |
Katalyst overview
Katalyst is a content-consistency layer for a body of markdown (and, later, other
storage). It lets you declare the structure your content should have and checks
that it holds — so a knowledge base stays consistent as people and agents add to
it. This skill explains the model and points you at the skill for the job; it
does not do the work itself.
Model and vocabulary
- Project — the whole workspace: a repo root with a
.katalyst/ config
directory that declares everything below. katalyst init creates it.
- Collection — a named group of like items (a directory plus a filename
pattern), owning the checks its items must pass.
- Item — one unit of content in a collection (one markdown file, in the
filesystem backend), addressed as
<collection>/<item>.
- Schema — the declared shape of a collection's items (JSON Schema today):
the fields they must have and the constraints those fields obey.
- Check — one configured constraint run against items; a failed check is a
violation.
katalyst check runs them; katalyst check-types list shows
what kinds exist.
The CLI surface: init (scaffold), inspect (profile what exists), check
(run checks), fix (canonicalize frontmatter), and collection/item/schema
subcommands to explore config and content.
The workflow, and which skill to use
Katalyst spans a workflow. Match the user's goal to a skill:
| Goal | Skill |
|---|
| Take stock of existing content, see what's there | katalyst-catalog |
| Name the collections the content is made of | katalyst-identify-collections |
| Define each collection's schema and checks | katalyst-define-schemas |
| Make checks run automatically from now on | katalyst-deploy (routes to the hook or CLI-gating setup) |
| Migrate content when a schema or storage changes | katalyst-migrate-schema / katalyst-migrate-storage (not yet available) |
Typical first-time path: catalog → identify-collections → define-schemas →
deploy. A user who already has a .katalyst/ config and just wants enforcement
can go straight to katalyst-deploy.
Prerequisites for the task skills
Every task skill needs the katalyst CLI on PATH. If it is missing, run the
bundled bootstrap (./bootstrap.sh) to install it from the latest release.
