selamy-labs Knowledge Routing
Knowledge gets re-explained and re-derived for one of two reasons: it is trapped in a place only one actor can read, or it is duplicated across several places that drift apart. The fix is a single rule: capture once, route to the one right home by type, and point — never copy.
The routing rule
| What you learned | Where it lives | Why there |
|---|---|---|
| A construct / technique many actors will reuse | a skill (the single source of truth) | versioned, audited, distributed once to everyone |
| A fact / state / decision | a memory / shared store that others can read | durable and queryable; it is knowledge, not behavior |
| A reference / long-form explanation | a wiki / doc | linkable, survives in depth without bloating prompts |
| A behavior an actor must follow | a thin pointer to the skill from the config file (CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md) | one source; the config references, never restates |
If a thing is two types, split it: the reusable part becomes a skill, the specific fact becomes a memory, and each points at the other.
Read from the same home you write to
Before asking a human or re-solving a problem, check the system of record first — the home a piece of knowledge would route to is the home you read it from. "Ask the person" is the last resort, not the first; most of what feels like a missing answer is already captured somewhere readable.
Capture once, propagate by tooling
The artifact is the source. Tooling (a bundle, a sync, a build) distributes it to every consumer. You never hand-copy the content into N files — the copy is how drift starts. Changing the behavior means changing the one source, then letting propagation carry it.
Anti-patterns
- Pasting skill content into a config file. The config should hold a pointer
("follow the
xskill"), not a second copy that will rot. - Filing a reusable construct as a one-off note. If others will reuse it, it is a skill, not a buried memory.
- A new parallel doc for something already documented. Extend the canonical one; do not fork it.
- Asking for what is already recorded. That is a read miss, not a knowledge gap — fix your lookup, not the source.
The test
For anything worth keeping, answer: "Where is the ONE place this lives, and how does everyone else read it without me telling them?" If the answer is "in my head" or "in three places," route it.