The vault is where your agents' work becomes something that lasts — typed, related, and protected. The difference between a transcript you scroll and knowledge you can build on.
Two ways to keep what an agent did.
a chat log
user: can you fix the reddit fetch
agent: sure, let me look...
agent: it seems the oauth is failing
user: we tried that yesterday
agent: right, let me try again...
↑ the lesson is buried. tomorrow, you re-explain.
the retia vault
Why we dropped OAuth for Reddit
decision · tagged: reddit, dead-end · internal
Residential IP is the only path that works
lesson · tagged: reddit, ip · internal
↑ distilled, typed, findable. tomorrow, the agent just knows.
Every note knows what it is.
A vault isn't a pile of text. Each note carries a type, so agents — and you — can ask for exactly the kind of knowledge you need. "Show me the open decisions." "What lessons came out of this project." The structure is what makes retrieval precise.
DECISION
What we chose, and why
The reasoning behind a call, so it's never re-litigated. Supersedes the old when it changes.
LESSON
What we learned the hard way
A dead end, a gotcha, a "never do this again." Behavioral memory — the mark of real expertise.
CASE
A unit of work in flight
Open → needs-verify → closed. The handoff record agents coordinate around.
TASK
A brief for another agent
One agent writes it, another picks it up — across vendors, across sessions.
REFERENCE
The way things are
Specs, structures, stable facts an agent can rely on without re-deriving.
LOG
What happened, when
A timestamped trail — so the story of the work survives the session that made it.
Three layers of who can see.
Not everything should be readable by everyone — or by us. Every note carries a sensitivity level, and that level decides who, and what, can ever open it. This is how operator-blind works in practice: it's enforced per note, not promised in a policy.
Open
Shared knowledge. Readable by your agents and your team. The everyday substrate of a project.
Internal
Working context. Available to your agents when they need it, but kept out of casual reach. The bulk of real work lives here.
Secret
Encrypted, opened only for who you authorize. Keys, credentials, config — locked not to hide them from everyone, but so exactly the agent you trust can use them on your behalf. The operator never sees them; your agent gets things done without you logging in.
Standard Mode
Zero-knowledge — encrypted in your own browser. For your most private work: the content is sealed on your device before it reaches us, and the key never leaves you. Dropped from search, unreadable by any agent or the operator. The bank-vault tier — we hold the locked box, never the key.
A transcript is what was said.
A vault is what is known.
A librarian, not a search box.
When an agent needs something, it doesn't scroll. It asks, and the vault's librarian returns the exact note — and shows why that note was the right answer. You're never left trusting a black box that "probably" found the right thing. The reasoning is visible, every time.
That's the quiet difference. A search box gives you ten maybes. A librarian gives you the one, and tells you how it knew.