Vault and Agents
What is documented about agents reading the Vault, how to point one at a document, and how to tell whether a draft actually used it.
The Vault is not a setting you switch on. It is a set of documents an agent can read.
Who Reads What
Two readers are documented.
| Reader | What is known |
|---|---|
| SAM | Reads the Vault before it drafts anything, and reads whatever you name: "draft this using brand/voice.md". Files answers back under slack/ with Save in Vault |
| Competitor agent | Connected to the Vault as Competitor Monitoring. The app's line for it: it "uses your Vault to judge what actually matters when a rival moves" |
The Vault screen also shows Content Analytics as a live connection, and Surface email, Surface forms, HubSpot, Gong and LinkedIn Ads as coming soon.
Which folders Surface's own agents reach for, and at what point in a task, is not documented. Do not build a folder on the assumption that a particular agent will find it. Name the path in the prompt instead, and check the output.
Telling Whether It Was Used
SAM usually names the documents it pulled from, in a line under the draft. If you get no such line, test it:
Run the prompt once
Ask for the draft as you normally would.
Add the one document you think is missing
A single objection, a single voice rule, one customer number.
Run the identical prompt again
If the draft changed, the document reached it. If nothing changed, name the path in the prompt and run it a third time. SAM says so directly when it found no voice rules to follow.
A Wrong Document Is Worse than a Missing One
Nothing checks a Vault document against your product. If a document asserts a capability you do not ship, agents will draft that claim, confidently, until someone edits the document.
Treat Vault documents as publishable claims. Anything you would not put on a slide in front of a customer should not be in a document an agent drafts from.
Vault over MCP
The four Vault tools ship in the default MCP connection:
| Tool | Use |
|---|---|
browse_vault | List or search documents. Takes query, pathPrefix, cursor, limit. |
read_vault_documents | Read up to 10 documents, and get the revision an edit will need. Takes offset and maxChars per document. |
create_vault | Build the first Vault from a public website URL. |
apply_vault_changes | Create, update, move or delete up to 20 documents atomically. |
For a coding agent: browse_vault with a pathPrefix, read_vault_documents
on the two or three that matter, then write.