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A base is a saved view over the other documents in your brain. Its rows are documents, queried live every time the view is opened. Ask your agent for a view — “a base of our competitor profiles”, “an index of research notes nobody has touched in 30 days” — and it creates the document in the base format. See Document formats. A base holds no data of its own. The document stores only the question; the answer is whatever documents currently match. Add a matching document tomorrow and it appears in the base without anyone editing the base.
This is the whole difference between a base and a table. A table’s rows are values kept in its own body. A base’s rows are other documents. Both render as a grid, so choose by what a row means: a record you are keeping, or a document that already exists.

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What a base can express

  • Filters select which documents appear: by type, folder, tags, or any key in a document’s frontmatter — “type is competitor”, “in the research folder”, “last reviewed more than 30 days ago”.
  • Columns come from the properties every document carries (title, description, type, tags, folder, created, updated) plus any frontmatter key. A column can be typed — number, date, select — which drives how it sorts and what can be summarized.
  • Views are tabs. One base can hold several views over the same pool of documents, each with its own extra filters, column order, sorting, grouping, and per-column summaries such as counts, sums, averages, and date ranges.
Under the hood, all of that is stored as one fenced block of configuration in the document body:
Your agent writes and maintains that block. In the app, you work with the rendered view.

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Working with a base in the app

The rows you see are read live from the current state of the brain, not from anything stored in the base. A base with more than one view shows a tab per view, plus a count of results. The toolbar carries Sort, Filter, a Columns control for visibility, a grouping control, and a control for adding a row. Clicking a row opens that document. Editing a cell writes to the document in that row, not to the base: it sets either one of that document’s universal fields or one of its frontmatter keys. If the write fails, the cell reverts and the app tells you. Adding a row creates a real document, pre-filled to match the view it was created in: its folder, type, tags, and frontmatter are set so that it satisfies the view’s filters and therefore appears in it. A base document has no properties rail and no width control, and its title is read-only on the document page. Rename it from the sidebar.

Data tables

A grid whose rows are values kept in the document itself.

Agent skills

Install the skill that teaches your agent the base grammar.