Your digital second brain
for every AI tool your team uses.
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.
Try the real onboarding flow right here. It loads the live PromptOwl app.
Every change, hash-chained
Tamper-evident version history on every document. The complete record is always reconstructible.
Steward-approved, always
Documents reach your AI only after a steward approves them. Draft content never feeds a model.
Every answer traces back
A record of every read: which person or API key, which document, and when. Every change versioned, so you can rebuild what any version said.
Any MCP client reads it
Claude, Cursor, Antigravity — any MCP-compatible client connects to the same vault directly.
Context fragmentation is already happening.
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.
Run it yourself. Or let PromptOwl run it for you.
ContextNest is the knowledge layer inside PromptOwl — a governed vault any MCP client can read. Run it locally for free, or self-host it free for up to 10 users. Or let PromptOwl host it, connect the agents your team runs, and manage who can access what.
Run it yourself.
- ✓Free for up to 10 users. No credit card.
- ✓Run it wherever you want — your laptop or your server.
- ✓Claude, Cursor, and more — all read the same vault.
- ✓Every change is versioned and hash-chained.
Let PromptOwl run it.
- ✓We run it for you. No server to babysit.
- ✓Your AI stops just answering and starts acting.
- ✓Bring your whole team in, with access that manages itself.
- ✓Every model worth using, already connected — swap freely.
The numbers behind a governed vault.
Research preprint, small corpus, not peer reviewed. Governed selection tested head-to-head against keyword search (BM25) and vector RAG.
Same request. Only the vault changed.
Same prompt, drafting a partnership outreach email to a fictional agency, Harbor & Pine. The only variable is whether the AI checked the vault first.
“Chris, I've been looking at what Harbor & Pine 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 Dana, I run PromptOwl, and I've been looking at agencies doing real work in social intelligence... We make ContextNest — built on SOC 2 controls, patent pending, and a team with roots in IBM Watson plus a research partnership with Emory...”
“Chris” — never verified, wrong contact
“500+ locations” — fabricated, the agency has one
“Control Plane” — retired messaging, October 2025
Dana, verified per the playbook
Every claim validated as current messaging and capabilities
Connect your team and all your AIs.
Connect every tool your team uses to a single, governed source of truth.
Structure your knowledge
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.
Govern what reaches your AI
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.
Connect all your AI tools
Once approved, your governed vault connects directly to whatever AI tools your team already uses. Whether you use Claude, Cursor, specialized agents, or ChatGPT once its connector ships, everyone queries the same single source of truth. No manual copy-pasting, no duplicate uploads, and no fragmented answers.
What connecting actually does.
Connect all your AIs
Bridge every AI agent your team uses — from Claude to Cursor — directly to your verified digital brain.
Standardize tools & skills
Establish unified rulebooks so all connected agents invoke tools and execute tasks identically.
Protect vital knowledge
Lock workflows and context with cryptographic verification. Critical files cannot be altered without approval.
Sync with your team
Instantly stream updated context packages and guidelines to your whole team, so every AI stays current the moment you approve a change.
Serious infrastructure, quietly running underneath.
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.
Nothing overwritten quietly.
Every change is versioned and tamper-evident. The full history is always there to check.
Any client, no setup.
Claude, Cursor, Codex, Gemini — any AI plugs straight into your governed vault. No custom integrations to build.
Every answer, traceable.
Every document carries its own version and approval record in frontmatter — trace any answer back to the exact document and moment it drew from.
Changes never slip by.
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.
Want the governance model in depth?
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.
Governed beats guessing. The numbers prove it.
A research preprint, with co-authors from Emory University and IBM Research, pits governed context head-to-head against standard retrieval. Governed context won on accuracy, cost, and consistency.
Don't start from scratch.
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.
Executive / Leadership
Strategy, operations, and leadership playbooks.
Developer / Engineering
Architecture decisions, coding standards, onboarding.
Analyst / Research
Methodologies, source catalogs, report templates.
Sales / Revenue
Objection handling, competitive intel, enablement.
Team / Organization
Shared processes, team handbook, onboarding.
Questions, answered.
What is ContextNest?
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.
How is this different from RAG or a vector database?
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 the same question pulls the same context every time. RAG and vector databases handle static knowledge: semantic search over large corpora that rarely change. Different jobs, and PromptOwl governs both.
What's the difference between the hosted version and self-hosting?
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.
How do we control what our AI answers from?
Steward approval. Turn on review and 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 read is recorded: which person or API key, which document, and when.
Where does our data live?
On your infrastructure. Your vault is a directory of Markdown files on your own machine or VPS, so your documents stay in your environment. A self-hosted server checks a free PromptOwl license key. Move it, back it up, take it with you.
Does ContextNest fix AI hallucinations?
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.
What does it cost?
ContextNest Desktop and the CLI are free. The team workspace is free for up to 10 users, on our cloud or your servers, and a free PromptOwl account issues your license key. Past 10 users, Hosted is $10 per user a month, and Self-Hosted is $10 per user with a 30-user minimum. Every paid plan starts free for a month.
What AI tools does ContextNest work with?
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.
How do I install the ContextNest plugin for Claude Code?
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.
Your second brain shouldn't reset every session.
Free to start. Self-hosted or PromptOwl-managed. Every AI your team uses, working from the same governed vault.