autology

The Problem

AI tools have made individual developers dramatically more productive — but organizational knowledge is not keeping up.

As each developer moves faster with AI, decisions, conventions, and context become harder to share. Knowledge stays trapped in individual sessions. Teams repeat the same mistakes. New members onboard from docs that don't exist or are already stale.

How It Works

      SessionStart hook
            │ injects autology-workflow skill as trigger guidance
            ↓
    Your Work: commit / decision
      ↑             │
   explore        triage
   (query)          │
      ↑    sync existing and capture new (parallel)
      │             │
      └───────── docs/*.md

Storage: Obsidian-compatible markdown in docs/ — flat structure, YAML frontmatter, [[wikilinks]]

vs. automemory: automemory is Claude's private, machine-local memory — per-developer, not committed to git, invisible to teammates. Autology is a team knowledge base: typed nodes, [[wikilinks]] forming a graph, doc-code sync, and git-committed so knowledge compounds across all developers.

Skills

/autology:triage-knowledge — Classify Knowledge Items

Scans docs/ against the current action (commit, decision, refactor) and classifies each knowledge item as existing or new, with topology hints.

• Existing items → feeds /autology:sync-knowledge with matched nodes and connected neighbors
• New items → feeds /autology:capture-knowledge with suggested relations for wikilinks
• Automatic: triggered by /autology:autology-workflow after every significant action

/autology:triage-knowledge      # classify after an action

/autology:capture-knowledge — Capture Knowledge

Extracts decisions, conventions, and context from conversation and writes them to docs/*.md.

• Autonomous: saves without being asked when knowledge is clearly worth capturing
• Deduplicates: Grep-checks before creating; updates existing nodes in place
• Connects: adds [[wikilinks]] to related nodes and updates the reverse links
• Types: decision · component · convention · concept · pattern · issue · session

/autology:capture-knowledge      # extract from current conversation
"remember this"        # triggers automatic capture

/autology:explore-knowledge — Navigate the Knowledge Graph

Traverses the [[wikilink]] graph — operations that Grep alone cannot do.

Mode	Command	Use Case
Graph overview	/autology:explore-knowledge overview	Hub nodes, orphans, connected components
Neighborhood	/autology:explore-knowledge <node>	2-hop expansion — blast radius before refactoring
Path finding	/autology:explore-knowledge path A B	Shortest path between two concepts

/autology:sync-knowledge — Keep Docs in Sync

Detects and fixes doc-code drift in-place.

Mode	Command	Use Case
Fast	/autology:sync-knowledge	Changed files only — run before every commit
Full	/autology:sync-knowledge full	Gaps, broken wikilinks, missing links — periodic audit

/autology:autology-tutorial — Interactive Tutorial

3-act hands-on walkthrough: triage + capture a decision → triage + sync on drift → query the knowledge graph with explore. Runs in a live git branch (~15 minutes).

/autology:autology-tutorial          # start from Act 1
/autology:autology-tutorial <1-3>    # jump to specific act
/autology:autology-tutorial reset    # clean up tutorial branch and docs

Example

Scenario: a team implementing JWT authentication across multiple services.

Without Autology:

Dev A: implements JWT RS256 in 30 min → reasoning lives only in their session
Dev B: "Why JWT? Why RS256 over HS256?" → no answer in the codebase
Dev C: migrates internal service to HS256 → no record of why RS256 was chosen → rationale lost, change undocumented
New hire: reads stale ADRs that don't match the code

With Autology:

Dev A: implements JWT RS256
→ Claude captures automatically:
  [decision] JWT RS256 — Context (stateless API), Alternatives (sessions, OAuth),
             Consequences (token expiry UX, key rotation ops)
  [convention] Always verify JWT expiry before role check (links to → jwt-decision)

Dev B: new session — workflow skill injected at start, Claude knows to check docs/ for decisions
→ /autology:explore-knowledge path jwt-decision api-gateway
  → sees: jwt-decision → auth-middleware → api-gateway (2 hops)
→ implements the new service correctly, no re-research needed