Procedures Travel. Knowledge Stays Home. · Greg Herlein
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Procedures Travel. Knowledge Stays Home.
25 Jun 2026, 00:00
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A couple weeks ago I wrote that your organization has to learn as fast as your best AI adopter. Externalize, combine, socialize, internalize. Run Nonaka’s spiral or get left behind. A bunch of you wrote back with the same question: okay, but where does the knowledge actually go?
Fair. I waved my hands at “a shared place” and “a skills repo” and moved on. Let me fix that, because there’s a real answer now, and it’s two answers, not one. And along the way I’ll show you how to stand up your own internal equivalent to apt install for your skills — your own private marketplace, no cloud required.
One side ships to everyone. The other side is yours and only yours.
Two Kinds of Knowledge, and We Keep Confusing Them
Here’s the distinction that took me embarrassingly long to say out loud. There are two completely different things we shove into our agents and call “knowledge,” and they behave nothing alike.
We used to just call them procedures. How to do things. Run the tests before you open the PR. Update REQUIREMENTS.md before you touch code. When you debug, reproduce first, then bisect. The discipline, the workflow, the muscle memory. Every shop I’ve ever worked in had a binder or a wiki full of them.
In the AI world we gave procedures a new name: Skills. Same idea your team has had forever — how we do it here — just packaged so an agent can pick it up and run it. This is procedural knowledge.
Declarative knowledge is what things are. The orders table joins to customers on customer_id but watch out, there’s a soft-delete flag nobody documented. The billing service owns idempotency keys. Weekly Active Users means this specific thing and not the three other things people assume. This is the map of your actual systems.
Skills you trigger with /skill-name, or they fire when the agent recognizes the situation. Declarative knowledge is getting a name too — it’s starting to live in something called OKF , the Open Knowledge Format, which Google Cloud shipped on June 12 of this year.
They are not competitors. I’ve seen a few hot takes framing it as “Skills vs OKF” and that’s the wrong frame. They’re two layers of the same stack. One tells the agent how to work. The other tells it what it’s working on.
Think about that for a minute. You can’t do either job with only half.
We Solved Distribution Already. It’s Called a Package Manager.
I’ve been pulling software off a distribution server since before some of you were born. My first Linux kernel was before it was 1.0, and even then there was a clean instinct baked into the whole thing: here is the reusable stuff that everybody shares, and here is my box, which is mine.
That instinct is the whole reason apt works. And npm. And Go modules. And Homebrew. A package manager distributes artifacts that are generalizable — the package doesn’t care which machine it lands on, because the how it provides is the same everywhere. Write it once, publish it, and a thousand machines install the identical thing. That’s procedural knowledge to a T.
But here’s the part nobody trips over because it’s so obvious: you never apt install your own application’s data. Your /etc config, your database, your local state, the actual truth about your deployment — none of that comes from a repo. It can’t. It’s specific to you. You curate it, on your box, by hand, forever.
Procedures travel. Knowledge stays home.
That’s the entire thesis of this post, and it’s the same split we’ve lived with for thirty years of package managers. The agent world just rediscovered it. Again. We always do.
The Good News: Procedural Knowledge Now Has a Package Manager
This is the part that genuinely excites me, and I don’t say that lightly — I’ve been here for all the hype cycles and most “revolutions” are a feature in a trench coat.
Skills are shareable. Really shareable. I install my core skill set on a new machine with one line:
/plugin install gherlein@gherlein-marketplace<br>That’s it. Engineering principles, my spec-driven workflow, the autonomous build protocol, git conventions — the entire how I work layer drops onto a fresh box in seconds. If that feels familiar, it should: it’s apt install for procedural knowledge. In Nonaka’s terms the marketplace is a Combination and Diffusion engine — somebody externalizes a workflow once, packages it, and now the whole team (or the whole internet) can internalize it...