accreta-setup

Setting up an accreta knowledge base

This procedure is distilled from doing it, not from planning it. The order below is the order that worked; the warnings are things that actually went wrong.

Where this file came from, and what it needs. npx skills add put it here, from the accreta repository. metadata.requires above names the earliest accreta release that has every command below: if one of them does not exist, compare it with accreta --version rather than working around the gap. Refresh with npx skills update accreta-setup — which overwrites this file without asking, so anything you want to keep belongs somewhere else.

Before anything: look at the corpus

The single decision that shapes everything else is which preset fits, and it is decided by what the sources are, not by what the user says they want.

Corpus	Preset	Tell
source code, one or more repositories	codebase	files with extensions, a git history, imports between modules
papers, reports, standards, specs	research	prose documents that cite each other, no call graph
anything else	(none)	the default vocabulary — note, source, concept, decision, synthesis

Do not guess from a repository name. Read a few files. A repository full of markdown specifications is a research corpus that happens to live in git.

If the corpus is genuinely mixed, prefer the default vocabulary over forcing one preset — page types are configuration and can be extended later, but a wrong preset produces pages described in terms that do not fit and are tedious to rename.

1. Initialize

accreta init --preset research    # or --preset codebase, or no flag

This writes accreta.config.yaml, knowledge/, sources/, and AGENTS.md — the constitution the maintaining agent follows.

init will not overwrite an existing AGENTS.md. If the project already has one, init says so and writes nothing. Compose the constitution separately and merge it by hand; do not delete theirs.