The shared knowledge store — what it is, and how it differs from project memory
New in 1.8. A local file, ~/.tausik-knowledge/knowledge.db, one per person rather than one per project.
This page answers two questions: how it works and how it differs from the project database. The Notion brain is a separate page, shared-brain.md — that is a THIRD store, and it is not this one.
Why it exists
Project memory (.tausik/tausik.db) knows everything about its own repository and nothing about the one next to it. With one project that is invisible. With three it becomes expensive: the dead end you hit on Monday, and wrote down, is one you will hit again in the next project — because the note stayed in another folder and search does not go there.
The shared store is where things go that are true not in this project, but in general.
How it differs from project memory
| Project database | Shared store | |
|---|---|---|
| Where | .tausik/tausik.db inside the repository | ~/.tausik-knowledge/knowledge.db in your home |
| How many | one per project | one per person |
| What it holds | tasks, sessions, verifications, decisions, memory, metrics — the whole lifecycle | knowledge ONLY: pattern, gotcha, convention, context, dead_end |
| What it outlives | lives and dies with the repository | outlives the deletion of any project |
| Who reads it | this project | ANY project on this machine |
| Does it travel in git | no — .tausik/ is gitignored; the tausik/ projection is what travels | no, and it must not |
| Is the content redacted | no | no — written verbatim, no scrubber |
| Is it visible outside | no | no; it does not leave the machine |
| Backup | database copies alongside it | tausik knowledge export, and that stays here too |
The "is the content redacted" row is the load-bearing one, and it comes back below.
The rule: what goes where
A formulation you can check rather than feel:
A fact about THIS project goes in project memory. A statement true in ANY project goes in the shared store.
The test, on the spot: imagine reading the entry six months from now, in a different repository, for a different client. Meaningless there? Project memory. Useful? Shared.
Error of the first kind — putting project-specific things in the shared store.
❌ --global "auth_middleware.py line 42 logs an e-mail address"Another project has neither that file nor that line. The entry will surface in search and get in the way. Worse: it names the internals of one repository in a store that every project on the machine reads.
✅ (project) "auth_middleware.py line 42 logs an e-mail address"
✅ --global "Logging a whole request object is a routine way to leak PII —
audit serializers, not just explicit prints"Error of the second kind — leaving general knowledge in project memory.
❌ (project) "FTS5 MATCH breaks on a hyphen in the query — escape it"That is a property of SQLite, not of your repository. Next month you will pay the same hour for it again somewhere else.
Commands
Put knowledge in the shared store:
tausik memory add pattern "Title" "Body" --global
tausik memory add gotcha "Title" "Body" --global --tags sqlite fts5--global puts the entry in the shared store or fails saying so. It cannot quietly fall back to project memory — you would believe the knowledge was shared while it sat in a single repository.
Find it: search reads both stores and marks which one a row came from.
tausik search "fts5 hyphen"The knowledge block injected at session start reads both as well.
Backup and restore:
tausik knowledge export ~/backup/knowledge # one readable file per record
tausik knowledge restore ~/backup/knowledge # records matched by uuidThe export is not a dump but a file per record: readable by eye, storable in a private dotfiles repository, and comprehensible a year later. restore matches on uuid, so running it twice does not duplicate anything.
One-off import from the Notion mirror:
tausik knowledge import-brainCopies the local Notion-brain mirror into the shared store. No network required.
Where is it right now: tausik doctor prints the resolved store path, and names the reason when a location is refused.
What it deliberately does NOT do
This is not a list of gaps. Each item is a decision.
It does not redact content. Text enters the shared store as written: no scrubber, no path stripping, no name substitution. The Notion brain cannot work that way — an entry there leaves the machine, so a linter cleans it and a risk classifier judges it. Here there is no cleaning, and the entire justification is that the store never leaves this machine.
It does not leave the machine. Hence the TAUSIK_HOME validation added in 1.8: a network path (UNC or a mapped volume) and a cloud-sync directory (OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, Yandex.Disk, ~/Library/CloudStorage/) are refused, as is a store git is already tracking. "It never leaves" is a property of a DIRECTORY, not of code, and that variable names the directory. ~/OneDrive sits inside your home, so "it is in my home" stayed true while the conclusion drawn from it did not. See whats-new-1.8.md, change 6.
It does not sync between machines. With no second copy there is no merge. Moving it is manual, via export and restore.
It does not record which client a row came from. origin_project used to hold the ABSOLUTE root of the originating project: on a machine serving several clients, one client's directory name was readable from another client's project. It now holds a basename@fingerprint label. Existing rows are rewritten on the next open.
It is not the Notion brain. Three stores, three different answers to "where does this go":
| Command | Destination | Leaves the machine |
|---|---|---|
tausik memory add ... | project database | no |
tausik memory add ... --global | shared store on this machine | no |
tausik brain move --to-brain <id> | Notion | yes |
Since 1.8 there is no automatic routing: the classifier no longer decides what gets published. Anything going outward goes by the third command, by hand.
Compatibility
A TAUSIK older than the store's schema refuses to run and says which version is required, rather than guessing at the format and corrupting the file. The other direction is safe: a newer TAUSIK migrates an older store on open.
The move from ~/.tausik/ (the pre-1.8 address) happens on its own: the store is copied from the old location on first use, and only when the new location is empty. Copied rather than moved — deleting things inside someone's home directory is theirs to decide. One exception: with TAUSIK_HOME set, adoption does not run at all and the move is yours.
See also
- whats-new-1.8.md — what changed in 1.8, including the move and the
TAUSIK_HOMEvalidation. - shared-brain.md — the Notion brain: the third store, and the only one that leaves the machine.
- memory-merge-guidelines.md — when to merge an entry and when to write a new one.
- architecture.md — where the
knowledge_*modules live.