Knowledge

Every Zeno profile has a knowledge/ folder for operator-authored markdown files describing the operator, their products, processes, glossary, team, habits, and projects. The agent sees a compact table of contents in its system prompt every turn (via an auto-generated _index.md) and reads individual files on demand.

Knowledge is read-only from the agent's perspective. The agent never writes to it. The folder structure is up to you — flat for solo use, nested for organizations.

Folder structure

~/.zeno/profiles/<name>/knowledge/
├── _index.md          ← auto-generated table of contents (do not hand-edit)
├── _README.md         ← how this folder works (kept current by `zeno profile create`)
├── _template.md       ← copy this to start a new note
└── **/*.md            ← your content, any layout

Files or directories whose name starts with _ are ignored by the scanner. Use this for drafts (_drafts/), archives (_archive/), or any file you want kept around but invisible to the agent.

Frontmatter (all fields optional)

---
title: Release flow
description: How code goes from main to production
tags: [process, deploy]
related: [stack, ci-cd, on-call]
---

• title — display name. Falls back to the first # Heading in the body, then the filename.
• description — one-line summary shown in _index.md. Falls back to the first paragraph of the body, truncated to 120 chars.
• tags — flat list, powers the ## By tag section of _index.md. No nested syntax.
• related — wikilink-style slugs pointing at other knowledge notes. Resolved by basename (stack → stack.md); use a path prefix (engineering/stack) to disambiguate.

Scales by operator size

Solo user (5 files): about-me.md, my-projects.md, habits.md, goals.md, current-focus.md.

Two friends on a side project: the-project.md, our-roles.md, recent-decisions.md.

Small company: team.md, products.md, glossary.md, processes.md.

Large company: nested folders engineering/, products/, policies/, people/, each with several files.

How the agent uses it

The worker bind-mounts the knowledge folder read-only at /app/knowledge. At boot and on every change, it loads _index.md (or live-scans the tree if missing or stale) and injects the content as a # Knowledge available block in the cached system prompt. The block is capped at 8 KB; over that, it is truncated with a note pointing the agent at the Read tool.

When the agent sees a request that matches an entry in the index, it calls Read on /app/knowledge/<path> to pull the full file body.

CLI

• zeno knowledge list <profile> — print every file with title, tags, and size.
• zeno knowledge open <profile> — open the folder in your OS file browser.
• zeno knowledge index <profile> — regenerate _index.md from the current file tree.

You can also edit files directly in your editor, Finder, or IDE — the CLI is a convenience, not a requirement.