
One governed vault that connects, commands, and controls every AI your team runs — Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and whatever ships next. Versioned, approved, and yours to self-host or let PromptOwl run for you.
Tamper-evident version history on every document. The complete record is always reconstructible.
Documents reach your AI only after a steward approves them. Draft content never feeds a model.
A complete trace on every query: what your AI consumed, from which version, at what time.
Claude, Cursor, Antigravity — any MCP-compatible client connects to the same vault directly.
Every person on your team is feeding their AI something different. Your engineers have their own context files. Your ops manager uploads PDFs directly into Claude. Your newest hire is going off the wiki, which nobody's touched since Q3.
The result: the same question gets five different answers. Your AI cites the pricing sheet you deprecated six months ago. A decision got documented and nobody's model knows about it.
The most valuable context of all lives only in people's heads — and walks out the door when they do.
ContextNest puts it somewhere governed instead — one hosted vault every AI your team uses reads from directly.

Without unified context, your AI models are just winging it.
ContextNest is the knowledge layer inside PromptOwl — a governed vault any MCP client can read. Self-host it for free, forever, no account required. Or let PromptOwl host it, connect the agents your team runs, and manage who can access what.
Governed context tested head-to-head against standard retrieval.
Same prompt, drafting a real partnership outreach email to TwinBear Management. The only variable is whether the AI checked the vault first.
“Tony, I've been looking at what TwinBear built — 500+ locations, national brand work... I run growth at PromptOwl, where we build the Control Plane — infrastructure that lets teams build, govern, and improve their own AI-powered content workflows...”
“Hi Tiffany, I run PromptOwl, and I've been looking at agencies doing real work in social intelligence... We make ContextNest — SOC 2 certified, a couple of patents, and a team with roots in IBM Watson plus a research partnership with Emory...”
“Tony” — never verified, wrong contact
“500+ locations” — fabricated, TwinBear has one
“Control Plane” — retired messaging, October 2025
Tiffany, verified per the playbook
Every claim validated as current messaging and capabilities
Connect every tool your team uses to a single, governed source of truth.
Write in Markdown. Use [[wiki links]] to connect related concepts. Tag documents with #topics. Add YAML frontmatter to define type, author, status, and relationships. ContextNest turns your documents into a navigable knowledge graph — not a flat file dump.
--- title: Q3 Pricing Strategy type: document tags: [#pricing, #strategy] status: draft --- We are shifting focus toward the [[Enterprise-Tier-Pricing]] model proposed by @Sarah.
Documents don't reach your AI automatically. In governed mode, every document passes through steward approval before it's compiled into the active context. Draft content stays in draft. Outdated content gets versioned, not deleted. Your AI only works from what's been explicitly approved.
Once approved, your governed vault connects directly to whatever AI tools your team already uses. Whether you use Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, or specialized agents, everyone queries the same single source of truth. No manual copy-pasting, no duplicate uploads, and no fragmented answers.
You never have to think about any of this. It just means the vault holds up to scrutiny — yours, your team's, or an auditor's.
Every change is versioned and tamper-evident. The full history is always there to check.



Claude, Cursor, Codex, Gemini — any AI plugs straight into your governed vault. No custom integrations to build.
Every document carries its own version and approval record in frontmatter — trace any answer back to the exact document and moment it drew from.
Edits made directly on disk, outside the vault, get flagged in the External Edits queue automatically. Approving them into the governed vault is a PromptOwl steward feature — the free vault shows you what changed, PromptOwl decides what goes live.
Documents don't reach your AI without approval, and draft content stays in draft until that happens. Here's exactly how review, approval, and audit logging work.
An independent study, co-authored with Emory University and IBM Research, pit governed context head-to-head against standard retrieval. Governed context won on accuracy, cost, and consistency.
Five free starter vaults in the Context Library, each with a real folder structure and example documents already in place. Pick the one closest to your role, and your AI has something structured to read from day one — not a blank vault you have to populate yourself.
Strategy, operations, and leadership playbooks.
Architecture decisions, coding standards, onboarding.
Methodologies, source catalogs, report templates.
Objection handling, competitive intel, enablement.
Shared processes, team handbook, onboarding.
ContextNest is wiki-style persistent memory for AI models — patent pending. It structures your knowledge into versioned, graph-linked, cryptographically verified Markdown documents that AI agents read directly via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Your AI gets permanent, governed context — it works from what you actually know, not from similarity guesses or expired documents.
ContextNest handles organic, living knowledge — the policies, processes, and decisions that evolve. Documents are structured, versioned, and human-approved, and your AI reads them directly — no embeddings, no similarity search — so you get the same answer every time. RAG and vector databases handle static knowledge: semantic search over large corpora that rarely change. Different jobs, and PromptOwl governs both.
Both run the same ContextNest engine. Going hosted sets up your nest for you — a PromptOwl-managed vault, ready in minutes — and it's how you add agents, RBAC, and the rest of PromptOwl later if you need them. Self-hosting the Community Server or CLI puts the vault directly on your own machine or VPS, using a free license key from that same PromptOwl account. Same governance model either way — the only difference is who runs the server.
Steward approval. Documents don't reach your team's AI until a steward approves them — draft content stays in draft, outdated content gets versioned rather than deleted, and every change lands in a cryptographic hash chain. Every query produces a complete trace: what the AI consumed, from which version, at what time.
On your infrastructure. Your vault is a directory of Markdown files on your own machine or VPS — no data leaves your environment, no external API calls from the governance layer, no vendor dependency. Move it, back it up, take it with you.
Partially. ContextNest fixes the governance failure mode — AI citing outdated, unapproved, or incorrect content because the context layer had no governance. It does not fix model-level hallucinations where the model invents facts not present in any document. What you get: an AI that works only from approved, current, auditable knowledge.
Community Edition is free for self-hosting — a free PromptOwl account issues your license key, and you govern your team's context without licensing fees. ContextNest Desktop is free for individual use. PromptOwl Platform and Enterprise tiers add hosted options, agents, white-labeling, SSO, and full compliance tools.
Any MCP-compatible AI client — Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, Antigravity. Claude Code users can also install the ContextNest plugin, which adds automatic retrieval from your vault and automatic capture of new knowledge at the end of each turn — no MCP wiring required.
Run /plugin marketplace add promptowl/contextnest in Claude Code, then /plugin install contextnest. Once enabled, relevant vault material is pulled into each prompt automatically, and new facts, decisions, and gotchas get captured back into the vault at the end of every turn. Four optional settings are available after install: retrieval effort (off, search, query, or agent), auto-capture (on by default), a pinned vault alias, and a ctx binary override — leave the vault alias empty and it picks the relevant vault automatically.
Free to start. Self-hosted or PromptOwl-managed. Every AI your team uses, working from the same governed vault.