kb

name	kb
description	Explains how the user's knowledge bases are laid out and which kb skill handles a given job — the tree, the one queue, expiry, links, base health, maintenance. Use when the user asks how their knowledge base works, what state a base is in, why something was or was not kept, or wants base maintenance run, and no narrower kb skill matches. Do NOT use to file something the user just said (that is kb-capture), to answer a question from stored knowledge (that is kb-recall), or to pick a destination base for a write already in hand (that is kb-route).
metadata	{"aos":{"origin":"kb@0.7.2"}}

kb — the base system in one page

Files are the database. A base is a git repo of markdown; every index is a rebuildable derivative; the kb tool never calls a model — mechanics are its, judgment is yours.

<base>/
├── .kb/          tool-managed: base.yml · state/<principal>.yml · pending/ · work/ · cache/
├── AGENTS.md     the contract — read before any non-trivial write
├── README.md     the base explained to a human
├── index.md      the map, one line per page
├── _raw/         source material, flat and immutable once ingested
└── entities/ concepts/ projects/ profile/    wiki pages — current truth only

.kb/'s three subdirectories have three tests: pending/ waiting on someone · work/ a procedure in progress · cache/ rebuildable, gitignored.

The queue

.kb/pending/ is the only queue — one file per item, waits_on: naming who is blocked (agent or human) and kind: naming what it is (capture refusal conflict entity finding). A queue file is only justified when the work has no artifact of its own; everything else is a query.

Two reads, and picking the wrong one returns an empty list with exit 0 rather than an error:

• kb inbox — your ingest work: waits_on: agent only, scoped to the acting principal. This is the nightly promote pass's read. On a base several people write to, that scoping is the point: the unfiltered view would hand you everyone's captures, so the same item gets processed once per person and somebody else's raw material enters your context. --all is the designated curator's path, not the default.
• kb pending list --where waits_on=human — the human's drain queue. inbox cannot show these at all (it filters to agent), so an agent looking for findings to surface, or a person asking what is waiting on them, needs this form.

For everything else, query rather than queue: kb find --where type=company --where tags=active over frontmatter (list fields match by membership), kb search for full text. The tool does the date arithmetic, so nobody computes "seven days before Tuesday" by hand and gets it silently wrong — but quote any comparison, because a bare < is shell redirection:

kb find --where 'expires<today+7d'

A field a base does not use returns zero matches with exit 0, so check the base's own frontmatter.extensions before filtering on something like due or status.

Lifetime

kb knows exactly one thing about how long a page lives: expires:. Without it the page lives forever, and most pages never carry one. _raw/ never expires — answers cite pages, pages cite raw.

Both ways a page leaves are destructive, so both get looked at before and after:

• Expired → kb --base <name> prune --dry-run to see the list, then the same command without --dry-run, then read what it reports as deleted. Git is the undo, but an undo nobody knows they need is no undo, so the point of the dry run is to notice a page you did not expect on that list.
• Stopped mattering → that is a judgment, not a date, so it leaves through kb --base <name> archive <page> --reason "<why>" — a git rm plus an attributed commit. Confirm the commit landed (kb history) rather than assuming it did. The tool will archive with no --reason and destroy the page anyway; if you cannot state the reason, you have not earned the archive, so don't run the command.

Name --base explicitly on both, every time. A bare kb prune resolves a base by walking up from the current directory and then falling back to the registry default — so run from anywhere else, it deletes from a base you were not thinking about, and reports success. The dry run and the real run resolve independently, so without an explicit --base they are not even guaranteed to be talking about the same base.

Links

[[wikilink]] inside a base. Pages move constantly — promotion files them into zones, agents create deeper subdirectories — and a wikilink survives that where a path-bearing link breaks in every page that wrote it. The link graph is one regex because of it, and an unresolved [[Acme Corp]] is a designed signal meaning "mentioned, not yet a page". Anything outside the base is an ordinary markdown link, which the graph ignores by construction.

Which skill

Job	Where it goes
The user just said something worth keeping	kb-capture
Pick the destination base for a write in hand	kb-route
Answer "what do I know about X?"	kb-recall
Create a new base	kb-init
Register a tree that already exists	kb-adopt
Bulk-migrate another KB's content	kb-import

The scheduled passes are not skills, and that is why they are not in this table. They are agent prompts — agents/archiver/promote.md (the nightly promote) and agents/archiver/lint.md (the weekly maintenance) — which the archiver agent is woken with, and they live in the capability source rather than in any installed skill. If you are the archiver and you were woken by a schedule, your prompt is your procedure: follow it, not this map. If you are the front agent and the user asks for one on demand ("promote the inbox now"), read that prompt from <home>/upstream/capabilities/kb/agents/archiver/ and follow it as written — do not reconstruct a promote pass from this skill, because the judgment that makes promotion safe (default-empty, and what clears the bar) is stated there and nowhere else.

Authority

• Freely: read what you are granted; capture; search / find / links / lint.
• Report-only: lint findings and sync conflicts land in .kb/pending/ as waits_on: human. The human drains that, never you.
• Ask first: any page in a shared base, zone or type changes (.kb/base.yml is owner-approved), anything under profile/, and flipping verified.
• Destroys things — never on your own initiative: kb prune runs from the weekly schedule, which dry-runs it first; if you are running it because a user asked, dry-run it and show them the list. kb archive has no scheduled owner at all — it is a judgment that a page stopped mattering, so it is the user's call and you propose it, with the reason you would put in --reason.

Deeper: reference/lifecycle.md (page schema, current truth, trust) · reference/grants.md (the one ACL) · reference/wiring.md (schedules and degraded modes).