A vault with nothing in it answers nothing. A vault with everything in it answers slowly and badly.
The skill is knowing which is which, and it is easier than it sounds.
Will this still be true in three months, and will somebody still need it?
Two yeses means file it. Anything else can go.
"We put the price up to $45 a head" passes. "Moving Tuesday's coffee to Wednesday" does not.
This is the whole habit, and it is two words.
At the end of any working chat, say "wrap it up".
The AI goes back over the conversation, pulls out the things worth keeping, files each one into the right note, saves any corrections as standing rules, writes a short journal entry, then tells you exactly what it saved and where.
It looks like this:
Saved:
- policies/deposits.md - updated, deposit is now 30% on bookings over $500
- suppliers/coastal-hire.md - new note, contact, lead time, delivery fee
- business/hours.md - Sunday close moved to 3pm from September
- Rule saved: call them guests, not customers
- Journal entry written for today
Nothing else from this chat was worth keeping.Thirty seconds. That is the price of the memory compounding instead of evaporating.
A chat that saved nothing taught the business nothing. Say the two words.
Prices. Your rates, your minimum spend, what you charge for the after hours callout. The number and the date it changed.
Policies. How the business behaves. Deposits, refunds, cancellations, warranty, what happens when somebody turns up late. These are the questions you answer over and over.
Suppliers. One note per supplier. Who they are, who you actually talk to, their lead time, their delivery fee, their terms.
Decisions, with the reason. This is the one people skip and later regret. "We stopped taking Sunday bookings because two staff quit over it." In six months somebody will suggest Sunday bookings again, and the reason is what stops you relearning it the hard way.
Processes you walked somebody through. If you explained how you announce a new product, save it as a playbook. Any AI you connect follows your playbooks from then on. Totally optional, and very good once you have two or three.
suppliers/bidfood.md. policies/cancellations.md. business/opening-hours.md.
Not notes.md with everything in it.
The folders most vaults use:
business/ the basics: hours, locations, services, contact, what you dopolicies/ how the business behavessuppliers/ one note per supplierstaff/ roles, rosters, who does what, onboardingstyle/ how the business sounds in writingplaybooks/ how you do a recurring job, step by stepIf none of them fit, use the closest one. Do not invent a new folder for a single note.
When a note relates to another, the AI mentions it by path inside the text, like "deposits: see policies/deposits.md". That is how the vault joins up, and it is why answers get better the more you file.
This is the rule that keeps a vault trustworthy, and it is worth understanding.
Status gets replaced in place. Your current price. Your current opening hours. Who your current supplier is. When it changes, the old value is written over, not stacked underneath. A note should never contain two prices with no way to tell which one is live.
History gets added to the end. Things that happened. A decision you made in March. A supplier who let you down last winter. Those pile up, oldest at the top, because the sequence is the point.
Nothing is lost either way. Every write keeps the previous version, and you can read it back on the vault website. Overwriting a price does not destroy the old price, it just stops the AI quoting it.
Your AI can move a note to the trash. It cannot empty the trash. Only you can, on the vault website.
Trashed notes disappear from search straight away, so a wrong note stops doing damage immediately, and they sit in the trash for 90 days before the nightly clean takes them.
If a note is wrong, correct it in place. Trash is for notes that should never have existed.
The vault is read by every AI seat connected to the business. Assume anybody with a seat can read anything in it.
So keep these out:
A locked folder is coming, for the things that genuinely need to live in the business but not in front of every seat. It has not shipped yet. Until it does, those things stay out of shared notes entirely. A password manager is the right home for a password today, and it will still be the right home afterwards.
If you ask the AI to save one of these, it will say no and tell you why. That is working as intended.