init

name

init

description

Creates a new knowledge base: interviews the user for purpose, zones, types and curation, scaffolds the tree, registers it, and wires the maintenance schedules. Use when the user wants a fresh base ('create a work base', 'set me up a knowledge base', 'kb init personal'), including during bootstrap when none exists yet. Do NOT use when a knowledge tree already exists on disk — registering that in place is kb-adopt, and transforming another KB's content into a base is kb-import.

init

Init is not done until the schedules exist (or their degraded run-cards do). An unscheduled base means an undrained queue and an unenforced contract, which is worse than no base at all.

1. The structure interview

Ask once, design once — the user is never bothered about structure again. Afterwards the agent operates autonomously inside the frozen zone set, and a zone change is an owner-approved .kb/base.yml edit.

• Name, path (default ~/<name>-base), remote (optional), audience (private default, or shared), sync (rebase-5min or manual).
• rebase-5min requires a remote, and nothing enforces that — stop and get one if the user wants it. kb init --sync rebase-5min with no --remote succeeds, and the resulting cron then reports synced (no remote) and exits 0 every five minutes forever, syncing nothing. No remote yet? Choose manual and switch later.
• Purpose — one paragraph. It is the rubric for both routing and recall. Write it well.
• Theme → zones and types. An engineering base wants different zones and types than a family or self base. Start from the template defaults and adjust with the user. Anything they say about what belongs where is routing gold: it becomes purpose prose and routing.keywords.
• Curation — on a shared base, who reviews what agents propose? self means each person curates their own captures (the default, and right for most teams); designated names one curator who drains everyone's. Private bases are always self.

2. Scaffold

kb init <name> --path <path> --audience <a> --sync <s> --purpose "<p>" \
  [--remote <url>] [--curation designated --curator <principal-id>] [--default]

The tool clones a template repo by default (read-only, unauthenticated, no fork) and drops the clone's own history before rendering; --template <url> points at a different one, and --templates <local-dir> skips the network entirely, which is also the automatic fallback when a clone fails for any reason — announced, never silent, never blocking.

It renders the templates, git-inits, registers the base in kb-registry.yaml, writes <home>/.aos/kb-principal.yml if it does not exist yet, and commits. It does not touch the repo's git identity: the user's own identity authors every write and the acting agent is recorded as committer, which is the attribution the weekly audit reads. Overwriting it with a per-base agent identity would erase the one attribution git gives for free, and on a base two people share it would make both of them the same author. If no git identity is configured the tool says so and proceeds anyway — capture never blocks — and lint reports the weak principal until onboarding fixes it.

Then apply the interview's zone and type adjustments with kb config set (for example kb config set 'zones.decisions={kind: wiki}'), which commits each change itself, and create the matching directories. Show the user the diff. A hand-edit of .kb/base.yml also works but leaves the tree uncommitted, which lint reports as a finding — so follow one with kb commit --verb config --path .kb/base.yml --summary "<what changed>".

3. Schedules

Three jobs, and init is not finished until all three exist. The harness cheat-sheet gives the exact cron syntax for this harness; what does not vary is what to schedule:

id	when	runs	as	environment
nightly-promote	30 23 * * *	the archiver agent, prompt agents/archiver/promote.md	agent job	AOS_AGENT=agent:archiver
weekly-maintain	0 7 * * 6	the archiver agent, prompt agents/archiver/lint.md	agent job	AOS_AGENT=agent:archiver
sync	*/5 * * * *	kb sync --all	exec job — no model wakes up	AOS_AGENT=agent:archiver, AOS_REGISTRY=<home>/personal/kb-registry.yaml, AOS_HOME=<home>

The environment column is not optional, and it is the column people drop. A cheat-sheet puts it in the job's own env, a wrapper script, or an export before the command — whichever your harness supports; what matters is that the job carries it. Every one of these fails quietly: the job runs, the work happens, and the damage surfaces days later.

Three things silently break if you skip them, and each fails quietly rather than loudly:

• AOS_AGENT=agent:archiver in both archiver jobs. It defaults to agent:main, which holds no write grant on entities/** concepts/** projects/** index.md — so a job that looks like it worked commits every promotion as the wrong subject, and the next weekly lint reports each one as a grants-audit critical.
• AOS_REGISTRY=<home>/personal/kb-registry.yaml in the sync wrapper (or pass --registry), because a bare kb sync with no resolvable registry exits 0 having synced nothing.
• The single-owner rule: each of these runs in exactly one harness, so check none of them already exists before creating it.

No cron on this harness? Then all three degrade to manual run-cards: write down the command and the trigger for each ("run kb sync --all when you finish a session"; "ask the archiver to promote overnight"), and tell the user, because nothing will run them otherwise.

4. Verify

kb lint must report zero Critical and zero Findings on the fresh tree (Info lines are fine — they are observations, not defects). Report back: the tree, the grants, the registry entry, and the schedules or their degraded modes.