> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.engineeringframework.dev/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# The Knowledge Base: What It's For

> Purpose of the Knowledge Base and how content gets in

The Knowledge Base is a searchable store of your organization's engineering
knowledge — decisions, guides, pitfalls, and process docs — that both people
and AI assistants can search. This is the foundation of Engineering
Framework's **agentic memory layer**: instead of an AI assistant re-deriving
an answer your team already worked out six months ago, it can search the
Knowledge Base and find the actual decision, with the reasoning behind it.

## Why this matters

Most engineering knowledge lives in people's heads, old Slack threads, or
documents nobody can find again. That means the same questions get
re-litigated, the same mistakes get repeated, and new team members (human or
AI) have no way to learn from what's already been figured out. The Knowledge
Base gives that knowledge a permanent, searchable home.

## What lives in the Knowledge Base

Each piece of content is a **Document** — a title, written content, a type
(decision, guide, pitfall, or process), and some organizing information:

* **Domains** — the subject areas a Document belongs to (e.g. "Backend",
  "Auth"). Each domain has its own reviewers, who approve content for that
  area.
* **Project** — a Document can optionally be tied to a specific project,
  instead of or in addition to a domain.
* **Tags and related links** — additional ways to filter and connect
  Documents to each other.

Every Document starts as a **draft** and must be approved by a reviewer
before it becomes visible to general search — see
[The Document Review Workflow](/knowledge-base-review) for that process.

## How content gets added

There are three ways content enters the Knowledge Base today. Whichever way
it comes in, every new Document goes through the same steps automatically:

1. It's checked against your organization's projects and domains, so it's
   filed correctly.
2. It's indexed for **semantic search** — meaning people and AI assistants
   can find it by describing what they're looking for, not just by matching
   exact keywords.
3. It's checked for a few basic content-health signals (see
   [The Document Review Workflow](/knowledge-base-review)) and given a
   starting confidence score, so reviewers know what needs the most
   attention.

### Automatically, from completing a checklist item

This is the path most people will actually use, and it requires nothing
extra from you. A handful of framework checklist items — the ones that
produce a real artifact, like architecture decision records, operational
runbooks, and documented design trade-offs — automatically create a draft
Knowledge Base Document when you mark them complete, using the item's name,
your notes, and any artifact link you provided.

This happens best-effort, in the background: marking a checklist item
complete never fails or waits on the Knowledge Base, and there's currently
no confirmation in the dashboard that a Document was actually created.
If you're relying on this and want to confirm it worked, check the review
queue or ask your admin, rather than assuming it always succeeds.

<Note>
  For more control than the automatic trigger gives you — or to script
  ingestion from outside the dashboard — see the [engframe CLI](/engframe-cli),
  a command-line tool you install and run yourself.
</Note>

### By hand, for engineering and operations use

Content can also be added directly by someone with engineering access to
the Knowledge Base's underlying systems, or through a service-level
connection used internally by Engineering Framework itself (for example,
the automatic checklist trigger above uses this path under the hood). Both
of these are internal/engineering capabilities today, not something a
general user sets up or uses directly.

## Where content goes next

Once added, a Document sits as a draft until a reviewer approves it. From
there:

* Approved Documents are discoverable through the search page in the
  dashboard, and through your AI assistant if it's connected — see
  [Searching & Asking the Knowledge Base](/knowledge-base-search).
* Drafts and retired Documents stay visible only to reviewers and admins —
  see [The Document Review Workflow](/knowledge-base-review).
* Admins can monitor how the review backlog is trending across the whole
  organization — see [Queue Health Monitoring](/knowledge-base-queue-health).