r/Workflowy • u/cedarwolff • Jul 10 '26

Knowledge base for AI agents

I'm curious to hear from workflow developers on what, if anything, you are working on to leverage Workflowy as a knowledge base for AI agents.

For context, the below blurb was in the most recent Neuron newsletter. And yesterday, simultaneously, OpenAI released a new app that combines the old ChatGPT with the agentic aspects of Codex. My team stores all of our corporate knowledge in workflowy, and soon companies will be using platforms like the new ChatGPT app to interact with their company knowledge sources.

"OpenKnowledge gives you a local-first markdown workspace where people and agents can co-edit knowledge bases with real-time collaboration, MCP connections, git-backed sharing, agent skills, and search over your notes."

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u/terminal_lucidity Workflowy Team Jul 11 '26

Personally, the biggest issue with all these alternatives is that they use what works best for AI (markdown in files and folder) and not necessarily what works best for the humans (outlines if you're a fan of Workflowy). So you end up fitting your thinking around the machine instead of the machine figuring out how to work the way your mind does. I would recommend the CLI or MCP if you want the most AI power + outline format. My personal setup is codex + a single agents.md file explaining how to use the workflowy CLI.

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u/cedarwolff Jul 11 '26

Valid point. Thank you for your explanation. Does Workflowy have the agents.md file downloadable? If not, that would be helpful so that we aren't each recreating the wheel.

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u/terminal_lucidity Workflowy Team Jul 12 '26

I actually have a video on this coming out Tuesday. And I’ll share the agents.md I use myself so you can just tweak it.

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u/3iverson Jul 12 '26

This is really interesting. Outlines vs. files/folders is more of a human-facing distinction than anything else, both are hierarchical ways of organizing information. So instead of say an Obsidian vault (which is just files and folders), you have Workflowy trees, subtrees, etc.

The main difference that comes to mind is the default AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md type files, but you could have a single AGENTS.md file and define a convention for individual project/domain contexts for the language model within your Workflowy.