Kilns

A kiln is a directory of markdown files that Crucible treats as a connected knowledge base. Think of it like an Obsidian vault — a living collection of notes that grows and evolves over time. As you write, link, and converse, the knowledge graph deepens naturally. That growing graph is what gives your agents their memory.

Crucible’s own documentation, as a kiln

Help/ and Guides/ ship inside the cru binary and extract on first daemon start. They are offered as a kiln named crucible-docs, lazy — never opened, indexed or searched until you ask for it, so Crucible’s documentation cannot turn up in results about your own notes.

cru kiln list                      # crucible-docs is listed, unopened
cru session connect-kiln crucible-docs

It is a kiln rather than a bespoke help index because docs/ already is one — the same markdown, wikilinks and frontmatter that build the website. One source of documented truth, read with the same tools as anything else.

Point it somewhere else, or replace it, by naming it yourself:

[kilns.crucible-docs]
path = "~/src/crucible/docs"
lazy = true

Meta/ — the roadmap, decision log and planning notes — is deliberately not included. It is maintainer material, and an agent answering “how do I configure this” should not be retrieving a roadmap that competes with the answer.

What Makes a Kiln

A kiln is simply a folder containing:

Markdown files (.md) - Your notes, ideas, documents
Config.toml (optional) - Configuration for this kiln
Any folder structure - Organize however you like

That’s it. No special database, no proprietary format, no lock-in.

Kiln vs Folder

Any folder with markdown files can be a kiln. The difference is what you do with it:

Folder	Kiln
Just files	Connected knowledge
Text search only	Semantic search
Manual organization	Wikilink-based graph
Static content	AI-assisted discovery

When you start using Crucible in a folder, it becomes a kiln — a living knowledge base that grows with you. As you add notes and conversations, Precognition draws on the whole graph to give your agents context.

Kiln vs Vault

If you’re coming from Obsidian, a kiln is similar to a vault:

Both are folders of markdown
Both use [[wikilinks]]
Both have configuration files

The difference is philosophy:

Obsidian vaults require Obsidian to get full value
Kilns work with any text editor - Crucible just adds capabilities

Your files are always portable. You can open a kiln in Obsidian, VS Code, or plain Vim.

Creating a Kiln

Any folder becomes a kiln when you use Crucible:

# Process files and start exploring
cru

# Or explicitly initialize
cru init

See Your First Kiln for detailed setup.