Agent access

Loofah has two local interfaces for agents. Both work on the same knowledge vault. MCP is read-only; the CLI can also create and edit sessions. A session may be a recorded meeting or a standalone note containing research, decisions, project context, or material brought in from another tool.

Interface	Use it when	Output
MCP	The client can run a local stdio MCP server	Structured tool results and resources
CLI	The agent can run shell commands	JSON with --json, or readable terminal output

A reliable workflow

1. List recent sessions or search with a short phrase.
2. Take the session ID from the result. Do not guess it.
3. Read session details before fetching a transcript.
4. Fetch the transcript only when the notes and summaries are not enough.
5. When the user asks to keep new work, create a session with clear authorship, useful tags, and the source artifact when appropriate.

MCP is usually easier for reading because the client receives tool schemas directly. Use the CLI when MCP is not available, or when the task needs to create or edit a session — MCP cannot write.

Every vault also carries a copy of the vault guide for agents at its root as AGENTS.md, so agents that land in the folder without this documentation still learn the layout and the rules.

What each interface can write

Use these interfaces instead of crawling the vault. They apply the same rules for canonical notes, summaries, speaker names, and transcript rendering.

MCP cannot write: no MCP tool creates or edits a note, action item, or session. The CLI can: sessions new creates a standalone note, sessions note --set and --append edit a note body, sessions attach keeps a source file with the note, import turns an audio file into a new session, and transcribe replaces a session’s transcript. sessions export writes only to the file you pass with --output, and replaces an existing file only when --force is passed. Agents creating sessions must always pass --author <agent-name> so the note is marked as not written by the vault owner.

Bring knowledge in from other tools

The CLI is intentionally source-agnostic. If an agent is authorized to read a document, research result, issue tracker, knowledge service, or generated deck, it can turn the useful content into Markdown and store it as a new session. There is no separate importer to build for every source.

For example, after researching a topic or extracting the important findings from a deck, an agent can run:

loofah --json sessions new --title "Research: customer onboarding" --note findings.md --tag research --author claude-code
loofah --json sessions attach SESSION_ID onboarding-research.pdf

This keeps the synthesized note searchable while preserving the source artifact beside it. The agent must still follow the source tool’s permissions and should only write when the user asks it to.

Use the CLIRun commands with JSON output.

Use MCPConnect a local stdio server.