Knowledge bases and coding agents

I am a big fan of knowledge bases. I’ve been using obsidian consistently since 2020. Today this knowledge base which has 2,343 notes that I mostly wrote on my own.

With AI, my knowledge base became a bit of a super power where I can ask it to think about any special type of work and it will leverage all my thinking and notes from my previous years. ¹

I believe AI coding requires these types of knowledge bases. And that knowledge bases are the best approach to transform institutional knowledge that we have as individuals, as teams and organizations for agents to do great work. And I think this is specially important in software development.

More importantly for me is that knowledge bases can capture the evolving knowledge that agents will create over our code bases. This knowledge would live in our internal documentation and in the heads of the developers. With AI, it lives in some notes and, if we don’t want to capture it, in the hands of the model builders.

Over time I think this concept should extend to having different layers of knowledge:

• Knowledge that is specific to your repo or team
• Knowledge that is specific to your organization (a super set or at least highly overlapping with team/repo)

I think then that an AI agent can follow a hermeneutic cycle of going from the whole org to a repo level (and vice versa) to understand how to tackle different challenges.

The AI models will be able to surface the knowledge that will be likely relevant to you. But certainty will come from bulding, nurting, pruning these knowledge bases.

I think this is the future of code review. The more specific we become to the institutional knowledge of a company and team the better the experience will be. With Static Code analysis we needed users to define their own rules which was laborious. Right now, people are crowding their CLAUDE.md with rules and knowledge but that’s not a sustainable approach. Nor do I believe humans should be responsible in the future to build these knowledge bases. Agents will operate in loops and will gather good decisions through adversarial analysis.

This is what we’re doing in Verity, a suite of tools for coding agents to loop better over time and with more autonomy by building knowledge bases of great decisions. After launching two days ago has already a larger knowledge base of 4k nodes that I was able to build in 2 years.