The problem: agents forget your project every session
If you pair with a coding agent, you have lived this: a new session starts and the context is gone. The agent re-discovers your auth flow, re-guesses why a decision was made, re-reads the same files to rebuild a mental model you already explained yesterday. Project knowledge — the why behind your systems, the runbooks, the "don't touch this, here's the reason" — lives scattered across wikis, code comments, and people's heads. None of it travels with the code, and none of it survives a fresh context window.
CLAUDE.md helps, but it's for standing instructions, and it gets loaded wholesale into every prompt. Auto-memory captures what an agent picked up, but it's implicit, per-agent, and not reviewed. A wiki is for humans and needs exporting. There's a gap: curated team knowledge that's structured, versioned with the code, and readable by any agent or person.
What OKF is
Open Knowledge Format is an open, vendor-neutral format (announced by the Google Cloud Data Cloud team in June 2026, Apache-2.0) that represents knowledge as a directory of markdown files with YAML frontmatter. That's the whole idea. No schema registry, no runtime, no SDK. If you can cat a file you can read it; if you can git clone a repo you can ship it.
