Getting Started
Everything you need to understand how Patina works before you dive in.
What is Patina?
If your team uses AI tools like Claude or Cursor, you've probably run into the same problem: every person has their own way of prompting, their own notes scattered across docs and Slack, and no easy way to share what works. New team members start from scratch. Good workflows get lost. And when something changes, there's no single place to update it.
Patina is where your team's AI workflows live. It gives you a shared home for the instructions, context, and knowledge that your AI agents need — so everyone on your team gets consistent, trustworthy results.
Core Concepts
Playbooks
A playbook is a versioned document that tells your AI agent how to do something. Think of it like a standard operating procedure, but written for AI. You can create a playbook for anything — how to write a customer email, how to review a pull request, how to handle a support ticket.
Playbooks go through a trust lifecycle: they start as drafts, move to review, and are published when they're ready. That way your team always knows which playbooks are reliable and which are still being refined.
Context Docs
Context docs are living documents that capture your team's business knowledge — things like your brand voice, your product terminology, your internal processes. Unlike playbooks, which tell an agent how to do something, context docs tell it what to know.
This is the part that makes Patina different. Most AI tools let you write prompts, but they don't give your agents the background knowledge they need to do your work well. Context docs fill that gap. Keep them up to date and every agent in your workspace automatically gets smarter.
Workspaces
A workspace is where your playbooks and context docs live. You can have a personal workspace for your own use, or create an organization workspace to share everything with your team. Roles and permissions let you control who can edit, review, and publish.
How It Works
- Create your content — Write playbooks for your common workflows and add context docs with the background knowledge your agents need.
- Install the plugin — Connect Patina to your AI tool of choice: Claude Code, Cursor, or Claude Desktop. Setup takes about two minutes.
- Agents pull context automatically — When your agent starts a task, it fetches the relevant playbooks and context docs from your workspace. No copy-pasting prompts. No out-of-date instructions.