Proposed Knowledge

Proposed Knowledge is everything that waits for a person before your agents are allowed to trust it.

Pathrule and your agents notice things all the time: a convention a team keeps following, a fix that keeps working, a constraint a paragraph seems to imply. Noticing is an inference, and an inference is not knowledge until someone vouches for it. Learning is never automatically trusted.

Five words that are not synonyms

The difference between them is the whole design.

Where proposals come from, and where they wait

Your agent, setting up a project

Ask your agent to "Set up Pathrule for this project" and it runs a guided scan: it reads the project, proposes memories, rules and skills, and writes only the ones you approve in the conversation. Nothing it proposes is saved until you say so.

Outside that scan, an agent that discovers something worth keeping usually proposes it to you before writing it. When it does write, the write is attributed, versioned and reversible.

A constraint attached to a rule

A rule can carry an executable constraint: a pattern a change must not contain, and what to do instead. When an agent attaches one through pathrule_write_rule or pathrule_update_rule, it is stored as a proposal. It is not enforced, and an agent cannot approve it. Only once a person has approved it can the pre-tool hook block a matching edit, in clients whose hooks support that. See rules as guardrails.

Team Intelligence, on Pathrule Cloud

Team Intelligence looks across the evidence a team's work produces and proposes patterns. A pattern moves from draft to suggested, and an organization owner or admin either verifies it or rejects it in the web console, under the organization's Team guidance settings; a suggestion nobody acts on expires. Only verified patterns reach agents. It is available on the Team and Enterprise plans.

Your personal preferences

A preference you teach with pathrule me teach is checked against your own words before it is stored. A preference that is not in use yet is listed by pathrule me list under "Not in use yet" and never reaches an agent. pathrule me explain <id> shows what it rests on, and pathrule me forget <id> rejects it. See User Intelligence.

Stale knowledge

When knowledge looks out of date, it can be flagged as a refresh task, for example by an agent that noticed the drift and called pathrule_request_refresh. A refresh is a proposal to change existing knowledge, and a person or an agent works through it with pathrule refresh or the MCP refresh tools. See suggestions and self-audit.

The exception: findings

Findings are the one kind of learned knowledge that reaches agents without a review step, and that is deliberate. A finding is advice, not policy:

• it is saved only after its source files are checked on disk,
• it is delivered only while those files are unchanged in the reader's checkout,
• it is held back when its sources change or when it contradicts another finding,
• and it never becomes a memory, a rule or a skill on its own.

Anything that should bind every agent still belongs in a rule or a memory, written and reviewed by your team.

What approving changes

Approving is what moves something from suggestion to verified knowledge.

• An approved scan proposal becomes an ordinary memory, rule or skill, delivered like any other.
• A verified team pattern starts reaching agents on that organization's workspaces.
• An approved rule constraint becomes enforceable by the pre-tool hook in clients that support it.
• A rejected proposal stays rejected, so the same evidence does not bring it straight back.

What it never does

• It never approves anything on your behalf, and nothing that needs approval reaches an agent before a person gives it.
• It never lets an agent approve its own proposal.
• It never turns a finding into a rule.
• It never edits what your team wrote without a person or an agent acting on a proposal.

For what happens once knowledge is approved, see Agent IR and safety and fallback.