Knowledge stack

Skill NickCrew/Claude-Cortex/skills/knowledge-stack

Claude Cortex

Install

npx -y skills add NickCrew/Claude-Cortex --skill knowledge-stack

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

One thing to look at

23 stars23 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.

What its author says it does

Copied from the file, not written here

Use this skill whenever working inside any of Nick's repos (under ~/Developer/) or whenever a conversation touches Nick's durable cross-cutting work — Atlas Crew product strategy/brand/planning, the Unanet job, job search, interviews, tax amendment, foreclosure/tenant situation, strategic positioning. Maps Nick's three Basic Memory projects (products, work, main) and the per-repo dev trackers, and says which layer owns which kind of question. Consult before reasoning from stored memory summaries about repo architecture, product decisions, active priorities, or ongoing personal/career state — stored memory is lossy; the trackers and the Basic Memory projects are the real artifacts and should be consulted first.

SKILL.md

6.2 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it

Knowledge Stack

Nick's durable knowledge lives in two kinds of place: per-repo trackers (code-adjacent) and three Basic Memory projects (everything else). Stored memory summaries are lossy snapshots of these; the artifacts below are the real truth. Consult them before reasoning.

The Layers

Per-repo dev work → the repo's own tracker, not Basic Memory.

Architecture, implementation plans, active tasks, roadmap-of-code.
Tracker depends on the repo: Cortex uses backlog.md (backlog doc list, backlog task list; see the backlog-md skill). The atlas-crew repos — Facet plus the security repos Apparatus, Chimera, Crucible, Synapse, Bridge — use GitHub Issues + Projects (gh issue, gh project; see the atlas-crew-tasks skill). Don't assume backlog.md everywhere — check the repo.

Atlas Crew product work → the products Basic Memory project (~/Obsidian/Product_Management).

Product strategy, brand, positioning, pricing, GTM, planning, specs, PM docs — the product layer, not the code layer.
Organized by Atlas Crew family: Security (Synapse, Chimera, Crucible, Bridge, Apparatus), Career Intel (Facet), Dev Tools (Cortex and utilities), Writing (Hard Stuff blog). The root Product Management Vault Home.md is the map.
_Archive/ holds frozen history (old job-search material, captured sessions). Treat as read-only context, not current state.

The Unanet job → the work Basic Memory project (~/Obsidian/Work, under unanet/).

Personal working-memory for Nick's Senior Platform Release Engineer role: journal/ (append-only daily firehose), systems/, glossary, open-questions, observations-about-me, etc. Its README defines the capture workflow.
This project syncs to Nick's work laptop. The bar for what goes here is "fine if a coworker glanced over my shoulder." Candid people-notes, political tripwires, and customer/contract/proprietary specifics stay in segregated local-only files outside this vault — never write them into the synced work project. When in doubt, append to today's journal and route later; when sensitive, keep it out.

Everything else cross-cutting → the main Basic Memory project (~/Obsidian/Default), the default.

Personal and career state that isn't an Atlas Crew product and isn't the Unanet job: job search, interviews, tax amendment, foreclosure/tenant situation, strategic positioning, misc research.
This is the catch-all. If a topic doesn't clearly belong to products or work, it lands here.

Ephemeral conversation context → this chat. Promote to the right layer when worth keeping.

Picking the project

Topic	Project
Atlas Crew product strategy / brand / planning / Hard Stuff	`products`
Unanet job (people, systems, journal, glossary)	`work` (syncs to work laptop)
Job search, interviews, taxes, housing, personal/career	`main` (default)
A repo's code architecture, tasks, implementation plans	the repo's tracker (backlog.md / GitHub Issues)

Operational Rules

Address the right project explicitly. Basic Memory MCP tools and basic-memory tool take a project (e.g. search-notes --project products). main is the default; pass --project work/--project products for the others. Searching the wrong project returns nothing and reads as "no such note."
Before reasoning about a specific repo, list its tracker first (backlog doc list for Cortex, gh issue list for atlas-crew repos) and pull the relevant item before concluding from stored memory.
Before reasoning about cross-cutting work, search the matching Basic Memory project (search, then read the note) before reasoning from stored memory.
When a chat surfaces something durable, propose writing it to the right layer — and use the Basic Memory skills to do it well: memory-notes (frontmatter/observations/relations), memory-ingest (unstructured input → entities), memory-research (research a subject → entity), memory-lifecycle (archive/status moves), memory-schema/memory-metadata-search (structured note types), memory-defrag/memory-reflect (periodic upkeep).
Don't duplicate content across layers. If something could plausibly live in two places (e.g. a product decision that's also a code task), ask Nick which layer owns it.

Failure Modes to Avoid

Reasoning from stored memory summaries when fresher truth exists in a tracker or a Basic Memory project — produces stale or wrong answers.
Searching one Basic Memory project and concluding the knowledge doesn't exist — it's almost certainly in one of the other two. There are three projects now; check the one that owns the topic.
Writing sensitive Unanet material into the synced work project — it reaches the work laptop. Keep candid/proprietary content in the segregated local-only files.
Putting Atlas Crew product strategy into a repo tracker, or code-task detail into the products project — knowledge drift across layers that compounds.
Treating Obsidian as required — Nick doesn't run the Electron app. The projects are plain markdown; use the basic-memory CLI/MCP or any editor.
Enumerating "Nick's repos" or which tracker a repo uses from memory and getting it wrong — ls ~/Developer/ and check the repo (backlog.md vs GitHub Issues).