Whitepaper

A vehicle, not an engine.

Every team can rent a frontier model. Almost none have a vehicle around it: a place where what the business knows is captured, recallable with citations, worked on by scheduled machinery, and reachable from every surface the team already uses. Gnosis is that vehicle. This page explains how it's built — at the level of guarantees, not blueprints — and ends with the live build log it was written from.

The four planes

Capture

Anything the team touches becomes memory: a note jotted on the desk, a dropped contract, a connector sync, an API write from an agent. Every record carries provenance (where it came from), identity (so updated versions supersede instead of duplicating), and an audit entry. Nothing enters memory anonymously.

Recall

Questions are answered from the workspace's own records, ranked by a fusion of semantic similarity, keyword relevance, recency, and trust — and every answer cites the records it stands on. When an enrichment runtime is unreachable, recall degrades to its next rung and says so on the result, rather than going dark or pretending.

The machine

Four primitives — engine, routine, run, trigger — cover what most platforms ship as forty features. An engine is a named capability; a routine is an engine on a cadence inside one workspace; every run is logged with an operator-readable summary; triggers start runs (schedule, manual, and — next — events and conditions). The starter engines cost zero tokens by construction, so the machine works before any key is configured.

The boundary

The workspace is a backend, not a silo: a token-scoped HTTP API, an MCP surface for Claude and compatible agents, and a skill base that ships in the repo itself — so the tools a team already works in can recall, ground, and remember without ever widening past one workspace's walls.

The doctrine: no bottlenecks

Every optional runtime — local model hosts, vector sidecars, converters, schedulers — enriches the platform and never gates it. The test we hold every feature to: unplug everything optional, and the pillar still works, honestly labeled. Writes that can't be embedded yet stay recallable and catch up later. Scheduled work that has no scheduler still runs by hand. Conversions that need a sidecar accept the formats that don't. The expensive path is an upgrade, never a prerequisite.

The security invariants

  • One isolation rule everywhere. Every tenant resource carries its scope, and every read and write re-derives that scope server-side from the caller — never from the request body. Keyed resources additionally carry a unique identity that makes cross-tenant collisions structurally impossible, not just filtered out.
  • Fail closed, always. Unknown credentials, missing scopes, tripped rate limits, and unexpected errors all end a request before any tenant data is touched. Public surfaces are an explicit allowlist.
  • Writes are earned. Creating anything workspace-visible — a connector, a credential, a routine, an API token — requires an editor-tier role, and every privileged action lands in an attributable audit trail with its actor.
  • Secrets are sealed or hashed, never stored. Credentials that must be read back are encrypted with versioned keys; tokens that only need verification are stored as digests and shown exactly once.

Cost, measured honestly

The savings number on our homepage is computed, not composed. It counts only work this instance actually routed, prices the freely-served share at the published rates of the paid workhorse model a team would otherwise default to — deliberately not the most expensive model on the market — and claims nothing for work without recorded token volume. A fresh install shows zero, because zero is what a fresh install has saved.

Build log

This platform is built in public, slice by slice. The log below is generated from the repository's own merge history — subscribe via RSS.

  1. The machine: routines, engines, and scheduled work

    Jun 11, 2026

  2. Creative desk: capture notes and files straight into memory

    Jun 11, 2026

  3. Full-width operator layout + map-pan compositing fix

    Jun 11, 2026

  4. Ask rebuilt: file uploads with real progress + tracking; project detail depth

    Jun 11, 2026

  5. Depth scaffold: answers → evidence → records → sources, plus the verified connector catalog

    Jun 11, 2026

  6. The faceted G — new logomark, plus the transparent-menu fix

    Jun 10, 2026

  7. Editorial design system, custom icon set, curated nav — and the Data window

    Jun 10, 2026

  8. Rebuild the knowledge map — real navigation, color system, semantic-zoom nodes

    Jun 10, 2026

  9. Out-of-the-box: managed embeddings + document ingestion, demo footage, CI security

    Jun 10, 2026

  10. Workspace at three altitudes: Desk, Teleporter, Map — hardened and bottleneck-free

    Jun 10, 2026

  11. Self-heal failed-migration state in deploys

    Jun 9, 2026

  12. Connections detail drill-in

    Jun 9, 2026

  13. Rate-limit the auth surfaces — fixed-window, failure-open

    Jun 9, 2026

  14. Declutter the shell header — remove the scope-summary stack

    Jun 9, 2026

  15. Decompose the Connections monolith into composable units

    Jun 9, 2026

  16. Typed provider-gateway contracts + provider profiles

    Jun 9, 2026

  17. Vault completeness analyzer + advisor seam

    Jun 9, 2026

  18. Scorecard-aware routing + confidence cascade

    Jun 9, 2026

  19. Gnosis design-language token system — structural tokens

    Jun 9, 2026

  20. Evaluations sidecar scaffold + client + contract test

    Jun 9, 2026

  21. Single-source brand identity + tagline

    Jun 9, 2026

  22. Recover stranded vault + routing-telemetry work

    Jun 9, 2026

  23. Routing decision log — append-only telemetry foundation

    Jun 9, 2026

  24. Document vault foundation — scoped templates

    Jun 9, 2026

  25. Consolidated experience pass — contextual maps, connectors board + disclosure, onboarding home, ⌘K

    Jun 8, 2026

  26. Green-gate CI + fix failing test + document the process

    Jun 8, 2026

  27. Brand color across the app + Team hierarchy map

    Jun 8, 2026

  28. Fitting company-design board, clearer connectors, quickstart

    Jun 8, 2026

  29. Gnosis next-level — relationship map, Ask intent router, team memory, document ingestion

    Jun 8, 2026

  30. AI-Native Designs — department blueprints, roadmap & adoption loop

    Jun 8, 2026

  31. Weld per-product credential boxes into one card

    Jun 1, 2026

  32. Calmer, lower-text dashboard landing

    Jun 1, 2026

  33. Registered connectors now appear and resolve by-key

    May 31, 2026

  34. Search Console ingestion (workspace-scoped, citable)

    May 31, 2026

  35. Fix finance test state — unblocks production build

    May 30, 2026

  36. Fix package build order — unblocks production deploy

    May 30, 2026

  37. Partner-aware memory & refinement OS — refine → memory → recall, data-quality dashboard, governance

    May 30, 2026

  38. Playground drag — no teleport, no off-screen drops + Tidy button

    May 27, 2026

  39. Finance preview hits + auto-activation on success

    May 25, 2026

  40. Bulk invite — paste up to 50 emails per org

    May 25, 2026