Docs and knowledge
The Docs surface, what belongs in it, how Terra reads it, how documents get created and edited, and which parts the agent writes.
Docs is the knowledge your agent works from, and changing it changes what Terra knows about your brand. It holds your durable brand context: the things that are true about you regardless of which page is being built.
What belongs there
Good docs are durable facts worth recalling across sessions:
- pricing and packaging,
- positioning and the argument for why you win,
- who the audience is and what they care about,
- decisions you have made and want honoured: naming, terminology, claims you will and won't make,
- background material on a product area that a page might need to draw on.
Leave out scratchpads for a single task, copies of what a page already says, and anything that changes weekly and would be stale by the time it's read.
The library
The library lists every doc, grouped by folder, with a search box (Search your docs) and a sidebar carrying All docs and each collapsible folder with its own count. Each row shows the doc's title and a one-line summary underneath.
The agent writes that one-line summary. It is what Terra sees in its always-loaded catalog, and it is what makes a doc findable. The doc editor has no field for it; the agent keeps it current as part of curating the set.
Folders are the agent's own categories. A doc you create lands in Notes, the holding folder, and the agent may re-file it into a better folder later. The Memory folder sorts last.
Some reference docs carry a Searchable badge, meaning Iterant indexes their contents for retrieval. It is a property of the doc; the editor has no switch for it.
How Terra uses them
Every doc has a usage, the role it plays for the agent:
| Usage | What it means |
|---|---|
| Always on | Context your agent uses on every task. |
| Brand facts | The details your agent treats as true about you. |
| Reference | Background your agent looks up when it is relevant. |
| Memory | What your agent has learned and done over time. |
| Playbook | A reusable workflow your agent can run end to end. |
On every turn:
- A catalog of every doc (title, one-line summary, and where it lives) sits in Terra's context, so it can see whether a doc on a topic exists.
- Iterant injects Always on and Brand facts docs in full, so their contents shape every reply. That injection has a hard budget, which is why the agent keeps this tier small.
- Everything else loads on demand. Terra reads a Reference doc when the catalog line tells it the doc is relevant.
So a rule you want followed everywhere belongs in a doc the agent treats as always on, and background a page might need belongs in a reference doc with a clear summary line.
The agent sets usage. The editor has no field for it. A doc you create starts as reference, and Terra promotes it if it turns out to be foundational. To have something treated as an always-on rule, say so in chat ("treat this as a standing rule") and Terra can promote the doc and record why.
Terra also curates the set: it creates docs after milestones, updates the one it already has on a topic instead of duplicating, re-files docs into better folders, and prunes stale or duplicate ones.
Creating and editing a doc
Press New doc. A blank document opens straight away, titled Untitled Document. Nothing is written until you type, so an abandoned blank doc leaves no row in the library.
The editor is one column: title at the top, body underneath in a rich-text editor with the usual formatting, links, and tables. Both save as you work, with Saving…, then Saved, or Couldn't save at the top of the pane. After a failed save your text stays in the editor and the next edit retries.
To rename a doc, edit its title. The doc does not move, and any link to it keeps working. A single doc is capped at 1 MB of content.
You create and edit docs here; the agent removes and reorganizes them. The dashboard has no delete or move action. Ask Terra in chat to delete a doc that is wrong or duplicated, or to file one somewhere better.
When someone else edits at the same time
Terra writes to the same docs you do. If a doc changes underneath you while you have unsaved edits, a strip appears above the editor:
This document was just updated by someone else on your team or by your agent.
Save my changes keeps your version and writes it over the newer one. Reload the latest version discards your unsaved edits and adopts what's on disk. Autosave pauses while the strip is up. If you had no unsaved edits, the editor adopts the newer version and the strip stays hidden.
The memory log
The Memory folder holds two documents the agent maintains: an activity log and a set of brand guidelines it has accumulated. They open read-only, What your agent has learned and done, most recent first, as a Recent activity list, newest entry first, each dated.
The log is append-only, and the agent writes to it after milestones rather than after every small edit. To have something remembered, say so in chat. Terra persists it as a durable brand preference and tells you what it saved.
Docs vs. the knowledge base
- Docs is the curated brand context above, a small maintained set that shapes what Terra knows.
- The knowledge base is the bulk material Iterant searches: the crawl of your own website, plus source documents you upload. It is much larger, nobody hand-curates it, and Terra reaches it by search rather than injection. Uploading source material for research happens alongside the coverage map.
Terra searches the knowledge base when it needs to ground a claim, and reads brand docs when it needs to know what is true about you.
Playbooks are docs too
Iterant stores a playbook as a document with the playbook usage and keeps it out of this library. Playbooks have their own surface. See Playbooks.
Troubleshooting
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