How Sophic Captures Knowledge

Sophic turns scattered tribal knowledge — Slack threads, PR discussions, CLI notes, and incident write-ups — into searchable, structured runbooks. This article walks through every way knowledge enters Sophic and what happens to it after it arrives.

Ways to Capture Knowledge

You can feed Sophic from wherever your team already works:

• Web editor — write or paste notes directly at app.sophic.so.
• Sophic CLI — run sophic capture from your terminal.
• MCP capture tool — capture from Claude Desktop or Claude Code via the Sophic MCP server.
• Integrations — Slack, GitHub, Google Drive, Linear, and Granola bring content in automatically.

A few capture examples:

# CLI: capture a quoted note
sophic capture "Staging deploys require the VPN; the runner can't reach the registry otherwise."

# CLI: capture from stdin (text omitted)
git log -1 | sophic capture

In Slack, mention @sophic in a thread to capture that conversation into your knowledge base (Basic plan or higher).

What Happens After Capture

Every incoming item lands in an immutable capture buffer first — nothing is overwritten or lost. A background sweep (the "librarian") then runs to consolidate raw captures into documents. During the sweep, Sophic:

1. Deduplicates overlapping or repeated captures.
2. Cleans up raw text into readable content.
3. Tags topics so related knowledge groups together.

Topic pages are AI-synthesized overviews that aggregate related documents, giving you a single place to read everything Sophic knows about a subject.

Sectioning and Embedding for Search

Once consolidated, each document is split into hierarchical sections and embedded (using Google gemini-embedding-001, 768 dimensions) into a pgvector store. That powers two retrieval lanes:

• Semantic search — vector search, best for concepts and fuzzy questions.
• Grep — literal or regex matching, best for exact identifiers like env-var names, function names, or error strings.

Results carry heading breadcrumbs so you always know where a snippet came from.

Capture Rules to Know

• Minimum length: very short text captures are rejected. Give Sophic at least a sentence or two of real context.
• Idempotent CLI captures: the CLI sends an idempotency key, so retrying a failed sophic capture will not create duplicates.

FAQ

Why didn't my one-word note get saved?
Captures below the minimum word count are rejected. Add more context — a full sentence or two — and try again.

Will retrying a CLI capture create duplicates?
No. The CLI attaches an idempotency key, so safe retries won't duplicate content.

Do integrations need a paid plan?
Slack integration (along with automated runbook generation and incident knowledge capture) requires Basic or higher. The web editor, CLI, and MCP capture tool are available across plans.

Where can I review raw captures?
The public REST API exposes the capture stream at GET /api/v1/captures. The public REST API is a Business-plan feature.