See it work¶
One real store, end to end: put sources in, extract claims, ask a question and get an answer that cites its evidence, then change your trust policy and watch the ranking follow — without a single stored record changing.
Deposit → extract → query¶
Point the store at two accounts of the same story: the Wikipedia article on Douglas Lenat, and an independent essay on Cyc, the forty-year formalize-everything project Lenat led. (Install first? — getting started.)
# Deposit sources (files or URLs): append-only, SHA-256 snapshotted
particles deposit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Lenat
particles deposit https://yuxi-liu-wired.github.io/essays/posts/cyc/
# Extract claim-granularity particles from everything pending
particles extract --all-pending
# State how much you trust each source — policy, not data
particles trust set en.wikipedia.org 0.9
particles trust set yuxi-liu-wired.github.io 0.55
# Ask, showing the evidence
particles query "What is Cyc, and what was Lenat's role in building it?" \
--show-particles
Real output, excerpted — the store extracted several hundred claims from the two sources:
CONF EFF EXTRACTOR CONTENT
1.00 0.63 general-extractor Lenat worked on Cyc at Cycorp since 1994.
0.95 0.37 github-pages-extractor Lenat started the Cyc project in 1984.
1.00 0.63 general-extractor Douglas Lenat was the founder and CEO of Cycorp, Inc. in Aus…
0.90 0.35 github-pages-extractor Lenat devoted 2000 person-years to the Cyc project.
0.95 0.37 github-pages-extractor Lenat left his post as a professor at Stanford to start the …
0.80 0.31 github-pages-extractor Lenat's approach to Cyc was the same as Minsky's Society of …
⋮
⚠ Note: The underlying knowledge base for this topic has relatively low
validation confidence, so some details below should be treated with caution.
**Lenat's Role**
Douglas Lenat was the founder and driving force behind Cyc. He launched the
project in **1984**, leaving his professorship at Stanford to begin work on
it at MCC … After the original MCC consortium wound down around 1995, Lenat
spun Cyc out into a for-profit company called **Cycorp**, based in Austin,
Texas, where he served as founder and CEO. …
Read the two left columns. CONF is the claim's stored confidence,
written once at extraction and never changed. EFF is its effective
confidence: the stored value composed with source trust and recency at read
time. The Wikipedia claims (0.90 trust) and the essay claims (0.55)
rank differently not because their records differ, but because your trust
policy does — change the policy and the same query re-ranks, with nothing
rewritten. Even the caution note is the trust lens at work: most of this
topic's evidence comes from the lower-trust source, and the answer says so.
Every line of the answer traces to the ranked claims above it, and each
claim to the exact snapshot of the source it came from.
Ask what it used to believe¶
Because nothing is overwritten, a store can be asked what it used to hold. Below is a real store that learned "Pluto is the ninth planet" in 1996 and the IAU's 2006 reclassification when it happened. Both claims are still there.
The retired claim is not deleted and not edited. It keeps its source, its confidence, and its dates, and it gains one thing: a pointer to the claim that replaced it, stamped with the day that happened. So the same question answers two ways — with what the store holds now, or with what it held on any given date:
CONF EFF EXTRACTOR CONTENT
0.90 0.90 … Pluto is the ninth planet of the Solar System.
As of the reference date, the Solar System has **nine planets**: Mercury,
Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto — with Pluto
recognized as the ninth planet.
↳ Pluto is the ninth planet of the Solar System. — now SUPERSEDED,
retired 2006-08-24; superseded by 7aa3b9fc: Pluto is a dwarf planet
(IAU 2006 reclassification).
The same question with no flag answers from present belief:
CONF EFF EXTRACTOR CONTENT
0.95 0.95 … Pluto is a dwarf planet (IAU 2006 reclassification).
There are **8 planets** in the Solar System: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars,
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. This count reflects the IAU's 2006
reclassification, which formally designated Pluto as a *dwarf planet* rather
than a full planet — a status it retains today.
And a date before the store knew anything answers honestly:
What this does and does not claim
--as-of is an assertion-time lens: what did this store believe at
that instant, and when did it stop? It is not a claim about the world.
Pluto did not change in 2006 — the belief about it did, and this is the
record of that revision.
Full guide: as-of time travel.
Getting knowledge in¶
Everything enters through one door — deposit, which writes the raw source
into an append-only, SHA-256-snapshotted corpus before any claim is
extracted, so every particle can point back to the exact bytes it came from.
What you deposit is up to you:
- Web pages and files —
particles deposit <url-or-path>, as above. - From your phone — a share-sheet shortcut deposits whatever you're reading into an inbox for later extraction: depositing from your phone.
- From your agents — AI agents read and write the store directly over MCP: memories an agent saves become sourced, dated claims instead of lines in a text file: Claude Code memory.
- Structured sources — domain importers (GitHub repositories and gists, journals, and more) deposit with richer provenance: the user guide.
The operations, at a glance¶
Everything above is four of seven operations. Select one to see what it does, step by step, and what comes out:
Keeping it healthy¶
A belief store accumulates contradictions and staleness the way a codebase accumulates technical debt — so the maintenance loop is part of the product, not an afterthought:
particles lint # surface contradictions, staleness, and gaps
particles review <id> # rule on a conflict; the ruling becomes trust policy
particles query "..." # every future answer re-ranks under your rulings
lint finds the problems; review turns each source disagreement into a
ruling; rulings accumulate into a reusable source-trust policy that re-ranks
every future answer. Your judgment compounds.
Lint and review →