It is easy to read Pathrule as a place to file memories, rules and skills by hand. That is the smallest part of it. The point is a loop that runs against real work and gets better the more the team uses it.

The loop has three moves: deliver, capture, score. They repeat every session.

## Deliver before the work

Before the assistant makes its first tool call, the path-scoped slice of your team's knowledge is already in context. You do not paste it, and the assistant does not have to go looking for it. Working in `/apps/api/payments` surfaces what is pinned there, plus what it inherits from the paths above. This is the delivery side most people see first, and it is covered in [How hooks work](/docs/hooks/how-hooks-work).

## Capture during the work

Knowledge does not have to be written in a separate sitting. Most of it accumulates from the work itself.

While the assistant works, it watches for things worth keeping: a decision you just made, a fix for a problem it kept hitting, a convention it had to be told, a gotcha that wasted time. When it finds one, it proposes saving it as a memory, a rule or a skill on the path it belongs to.

Two properties matter here:

- **You stay in control.** The assistant writes via the MCP tools only after you confirm. Nothing is saved without your approval, and Pathrule never edits or deletes your knowledge on its own.
- **Upkeep stays close to zero.** Because capture rides along with normal work, the knowledge base grows without a second job of writing docs. You can still author directly in the web app, desktop or CLI whenever you want to.

## Score, so the best surfaces first

Ranking happens in two layers. The routing and base ranking that decide which candidates surface are open source and run locally, so you can read and even modify exactly how they choose. The cloud edition adds a separate learning layer on top: it tracks which knowledge actually helped on similar work and re-ranks future results, so the most valuable surfaces first. Sessions stay sharp instead of noisy, and entries that have gone stale or stopped matching anything are raised as suggestions for you to review. See [Suggestions and self-audit](/docs/content/suggestions) for how decay is surfaced.

## Why the loop is the product

A static file or a single tool's built-in memory can do delivery. What compounds is the loop: every task can leave the team a little smarter, and the next session starts from that.

Because the knowledge lives outside any single assistant and is served over one MCP surface, it is portable. The same memories, rules and skills reach Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Windsurf and GitHub Copilot. A native memory feature inside one tool does not replace this, because that memory stays inside that tool. The lasting value is the accumulated team knowledge, not any individual rule or prompt file.