Skip to main content

Knowledge Bases

A knowledge base is a local folder of documents — typically a team's runbooks, troubleshooting guides (TSGs), and postmortems — that your connected AI client searches when answering. It's what turns "an LLM's general opinion" into "an answer grounded in your documents, with citations you can click".

Knowledge folders live in your Library. Open Library → Knowledge folders, click Add folder, and pick a directory. The folder is linked in place — NeatContext reads it where it lives; nothing is copied or uploaded. A read-only Team Library can share folders too.

Some useful properties:

  • The folder stays yours. Keep runbooks in the git repo where they already live; edits are picked up automatically on the next search.
  • Click a folder's name to see its full path; use its reveal action to open it in your file explorer.

Select it into a Context​

On the Contexts page, under Knowledge folders, choose Add from Library to attach a folder to the current Context. Attach as many as the topic needs (runbooks + postmortems + architecture notes, say). The ✕ detaches a folder from this Context only; other Contexts, the Library entry, and the folder on disk are untouched.

How it shows up in answers​

When you ask a question in a connected client, the documents it uses are cited in the answer's Sources section — as clickable links to the exact lines. That's how you verify an answer instead of trusting it. Searches run locally on your machine.

Text-based documents work best — Markdown, plain text, logs, JSON, CSV, HTML. Folders work best when they're focused documentation folders rather than an entire home directory.

Tips for a good knowledge base​

The documents that work best are the ones that are good for humans too:

  • Use the real names of things — service names, error strings, config keys. A runbook that quotes the exact error (could not obtain connection from pool 'billing-postgres') is easy to find the moment that error appears in an incident.
  • One topic per file, with a descriptive filename (checkout-api-5xx.md beats notes3.md) — the filename is also what you'll see in the cited sources.
  • Keep postmortems. They encode "we've seen this before", which is often the fastest route to a diagnosis.

The incident demo's knowledge folders show the pattern: runbooks/, tsg/, and postmortems/ per team.

Plan limits

The number of knowledge folders per Context depends on your plan — see neatcontext.com/pricing.