WeKnora/cli/AGENTS.md

Agent Integration Guide for weknora CLI

Scope. This file is an operational reference for LLM agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Aider, Gemini Coder, etc.) that invoke weknora on a user's behalf. It documents the wire shape, exit code, and behavioral conventions an agent integration relies on.

This is not a contributor guide. If you are an AI coding agent editing weknora's source, see the repo root README.md (and, if added later, a separate contributor AGENTS.md at the repo root).

Naming note. "Agent" appears in two distinct WeKnora contexts:

• This file (AGENTS.md) + the agent annotation on each command's --help: documents the contract for AI coding agents (you, the LLM-driven CLI consumer).
• The weknora agent subtree (agent list / view / invoke): manages WeKnora's first-class Custom Agent resources — server-side records (system prompt + model + allowed tools + KB scope) that the user authored in the web UI. agent invoke calls the agent's configured workflow against a query; it is not how you, the AI coding agent, drive WeKnora — that's kb / doc / search / chat / mcp serve.

weknora is designed to be agent-friendly: error messages, output format, and flag design follow conventions agents can rely on. Wire-contract breaking changes are flagged in their PR description and the corresponding weknora --version bump — agents should pin a known-good version and re-validate against --help output on upgrade.

The "Output contract" and "Behavioral rules" sections below are the self-contained specification of the wire format; everything an integrator needs is in this document.

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Output contract

Streams

• stdout is the data channel: JSON envelope (with --json) or human-formatted output.
• stderr is logs / progress / warnings / agent guidance footnotes. Never parse stderr for data.

A non-empty stderr does not mean failure — read the exit code instead.

JSON envelope

When --json is set, stdout contains exactly one envelope:

{
  "ok": true,                 // false on failure; check this first
  "data": { /* command-specific payload */ },
  "error": { "code": "...", "message": "...", "hint": "..." },  // iff ok=false
  "_meta": { "request_id": "...", "kb_id": "..." },             // optional
  "risk": { "level": "high-risk-write", "action": "..." },      // write commands
  "dry_run": false                                              // true on --dry-run
}

This snippet is illustrative. Fields are added (never renamed or repurposed) within a minor version, and agents must not error on unknown keys. The authoritative envelope shape lives in cli/internal/format/envelope.go.

Error codes (closed registry)

error.code is a namespace.snake_case string from a closed registry in cli/internal/cmdutil/errors.go AllCodes(). An acceptance test enforces that every code referenced in cli/cmd/ is registered.

Categories: auth.* / resource.* / input.* / server.* / network.* / local.* / mcp.*.

error.hint provides a deterministic next-step hint agents can follow without natural-language parsing.

Exit codes

Code	Meaning	Agent action
0	Success	Continue
1	Typed error (see envelope.error.code)	Read code, decide retry/abort
2	Flag/argument validation error	Re-check weknora <command> --help
10	Confirmation required for high-risk write	Ask the human, retry with -y only after explicit approval
130	Cancelled (SIGINT / Ctrl-C)	Stop, do not retry

Exit 10 is the wire-level signal for "high-risk write needs explicit confirmation". Never bypass exit 10 by auto-passing -y without explicit user permission.

---

Command surface

Discover the command tree the same way human users do:

weknora --help                       # top-level
weknora kb --help                    # subtree
weknora kb delete --help             # single command flags

The command tree follows <noun> <verb>. Verbs are:

Verb	Semantics	Example
list	Multi-resource read	kb list
view	Single-resource read	kb view <id>
create	Create resource	kb create --name X
edit	Partial update (only sent fields change)	kb edit <id> --description X
delete	Destructive remove (KB itself)	kb delete <id> -y
empty	Bulk-delete contents, preserve container	kb empty <id> -y
upload	Bulk write content	doc upload <file>
download	Stream resource to disk	doc download <id> -O file
pin / unpin	Toggle "pinned" state (idempotent)	kb pin <id>
use	Switch active selection	context use <name>
add / remove	Manage local config entries	context add staging --host ...

auth subtree: login / logout / list / status / refresh / token. Context-switching uses context use <name> (WeKnora contexts bundle host + tenant + credentials, so they need a richer abstraction than a single per-host token slot). auth refresh exchanges the stored refresh token for a new access + refresh pair (OAuth refresh-token grant); it errors with input.invalid_argument on API-key contexts which have no refresh semantic. Transparent 401 → refresh → retry is wired into the SDK transport (cli/internal/cmdutil/authretry.go) with singleflight de-dup, so most callers never need to invoke auth refresh explicitly.

search subtree: search chunks "<q>" --kb X for hybrid retrieval; search kb "<q>" / search docs "<q>" --kb X / search sessions "<q>" for client-side substring filtering on the listing endpoints.

session subtree: list / view / delete for chat session management. Sessions are the durable wrapper around chat invocations.

Top-level RAG / connectivity verbs: chat, search, api, link, auth, context, session, doctor, version.

doctor is a deliberate WeKnora addition: RAG deployments routinely break on misconfigured embeddings, storage backends, and credentials, and a structured 4-status envelope (ok/warn/fail/skip) is the cleanest agent-readable surface for that.

---

Behavioral rules

Per-command guidance also appears in each command's --help output (under "AI Agent guidance:").

1. Pass -y/--yes on kb delete / doc delete / auth logout when running headless. Without it, you will get exit 10. Never auto-add -y without the user's explicit go-ahead — the exit-10 protocol is the one explicit guard against unintended writes.
2. Prefer typed commands over weknora api for known endpoints. Fallback to weknora api only when no typed command covers the call.
3. For chat, prefer --no-stream --json in agent contexts. Streaming tokens to stdout makes JSON envelope parsing impossible.
4. Honor --dry-run — when the user passes it, don't follow up with the real command unless explicitly asked. The dry-run envelope is the answer.
5. link writes to the user's working directory — only run it when the user invoked it, not as a side effect of unrelated automation.

(Additional safety guidance — e.g. "do not switch context unless the user asked" — is documented in the affected command's own --help.)

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Auto-detection of agent environments

weknora checks these environment variables (case-sensitive):

Env var	Detected agent name
CLAUDECODE	claude-code
CURSOR_AGENT	cursor

When any is set, weknora --help appends the command's agent_help annotation. No behavior change — this is help-text rendering only.

To suppress detection (e.g. running weknora interactively from inside Claude Code without the agent footer): WEKNORA_NO_AGENT_AUTODETECT=1.

The omnibus --agent mode-switch flag that briefly existed in early v0.2 was removed in favor of per-command --json + TTY auto-detect, which covers the same ground without an extra global switch. Agent detection (CLAUDECODE / CURSOR_AGENT env) only tags the User-Agent header for server-side telemetry — it never changes CLI behavior.

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Architecture decisions

A handful of decisions are referenced inline in the source as ADR-N. They live here, alongside the contract they shape.

ADR-3 — opinionated noun-verb tree with stable JSON envelope. The v0.0/v0.1 surface was audited against several mainstream CLIs; the "opinionated noun-verb tool with stable JSON envelope + agent-aware error model" shape was the closest fit for the agent-friendly contract this document promises. WeKnora-specific shape choices:

• link (project-binding) — <cwd>/.weknora/project.yaml walk-up matches how RAG users scope work to a specific knowledge base. There is no per-host config model competing with it; context use is the separate mechanism for switching the credential set.
• chat / search are domain-specific verbs (LLM streaming + retrieval) with no equivalent in pure-API CLIs.
• context use switches the active credential set; contexts bundle host + tenant + credential, so a richer abstraction than a single per-host token slot is required.
• doctor (4-status: ok / warn / fail / skip) is the agent-readable surface for RAG-deployment misconfiguration (embeddings, storage, credentials) — failure modes that the underlying SDK can't classify on its own.

Verb canon: list / view / create / edit / delete / upload / download / pin / unpin / use. WeKnora-specific verbs for resource semantics the common set lacks: empty (bulk-delete contents preserving the container), refresh (token), add / remove (context CRUD), link / unlink (project bind / unbind), invoke (run a custom agent), serve (long-lived MCP transport).

ADR-4 — Factory closures + narrow Service interfaces. cmdutil.Factory exposes four lazy closures (Config / Client / Prompter / Secrets) that commands may invoke, but each subcommand declares its own narrow Service interface for the SDK calls it actually makes. The production *sdk.Client satisfies these implicitly via duck typing; tests inject fakes. Splitting the boundaries this way means a subcommand's test can stand up an httptest.Server (or a hand-rolled struct) without standing up the full SDK, and the dependency graph of any one command is visible in one file.

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Known limitations

The following classes of failure currently surface as error.code = "network.error" with context deadline exceeded rather than a precise typed code. A future release will introduce a precondition.* namespace (server returns HTTP 412 with a typed remediation body before opening the SSE / streaming response):

• weknora chat when no chat model is configured for the active tenant
• weknora search chunks when no retriever / vector store is configured
• weknora doc upload when no storage engine is selected for the KB

Workaround until then: if a chat / search / upload call times out without producing a first-byte response, check the server's tenant configuration (LLM / vector store / storage engine) before retrying. A planned weknora doctor --server-config will probe these directly.

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Reporting issues

If the CLI's behavior contradicts this document, that is a bug. File at https://github.com/Tencent/WeKnora/issues with:

• The exact command line
• weknora --version output
• The envelope you got vs the envelope this document promises