VanaMD — Knowledge management built on Git for the AI era

VanaMD is a collaborative knowledge base backed by Git versioning and Markdown — a format humans can write and AI can read without conversion.

The thesis: Developers don't have a knowledge management problem. Everyone else does.

Git repositories are the best-designed knowledge management system in existence. Versioning, ownership, review workflows, structured format, full history. The reason engineers don't spend hours searching for information is that Git imposed a discipline wikis and shared drives never did.

Meanwhile, organizational knowledge — policies, processes, runbooks, institutional wisdom — lives across a dozen tools in proprietary formats. That was tolerable when only humans needed to read it.

AI can't infer or navigate ambiguity. It processes exactly what it's given. And what it's given, in most organizations, is fragmented, contradictory, and locked in formats that require lossy conversion before an LLM can read a word of it.

VanaMD brings Git's discipline to the rest of the organization's knowledge. A collaborative editor non-technical people can use. Markdown in Git underneath so it's natively readable by AI. Compliance tracking for regulated industries.

What we're building: Five layers. One knowledge base.

  • Write — Collaborative editor. Rich editing with real-time collaboration. Writers never see Git or Markdown.
  • Version — Git-backed versioning. Every change tracked, attributable, reversible. True branching and merging on knowledge.
  • Discover — Knowledge health. Staleness detection, gap analysis, contradiction flagging. AI-assisted, human-validated.
  • Comply — Compliance tracking. Attestation, audit trails, policy lifecycle. For healthcare, financial services, government.
  • Connect — AI reads it directly. Every document is clean Markdown. An auto-generated llms.txt tells agents what's available.

Direction: Where this is headed

Now — Foundation

Open-source core editor, Git sync engine, knowledge health scoring, compliance metadata, llms.txt for AI discovery.

Next — Team features

SSO and team management, import from existing wikis, AI-powered discovery, review workflows, hosted SaaS option.

Later — Enterprise

Attestation tracking, audit trail export, explication assistant, knowledge graph, advanced access controls.

Follow the build

We're building VanaMD in the open. Get occasional updates on progress, architecture decisions, and what we're learning.