--- title: What Vythos is description: Vythos keeps your agency's rules as the documents you already have, follows those documents when they change, and hands the current version to your team and their AI tools. --- Get started # What Vythos is Vythos is where your agency's rules live so that people — and the AI tools they use — work from the current ones. Your rate card is a file. Your tone of voice is a page someone wrote. Your payment terms are in a contract template, your approval steps in a process doc. None of that is wrong. The problem is what happens next: a freelancer quotes last year's day rate, a proposal goes out at net-30 when that client is on net-45, and a draft written with an AI tool uses three words your brand guidelines ban — because the tool had no idea the guidelines existed. Vythos fixes the reaching, not the writing. You keep your documents where they are. You tell Vythos which of them are rules. From then on, those rules are available at the moment work happens. ## How it works, in four sentences 1. **You name the documents that are rules.** A Google Drive file, a Notion page or a file you upload. That document becomes a rule in your [Playbook](/concepts/playbook). 2. **Vythos follows the file.** It re-reads each rule's document roughly every ten minutes. When the wording changes, the rule gets a new version and the old one is kept. 3. **Everything else you connect becomes memory.** Briefs, notes, emails, repositories, your website: searchable, never governing. Nothing becomes a rule on its own. 4. **Your rules reach the work.** Ask questions inside Vythos, or connect Claude, Cursor or your own agent so they receive the rules that apply to the task — client rules ahead of house defaults. ## What makes it different from a folder A shared drive holds documents. It can't tell you which of them still counts, which client overrides which, or what the current number is — and it certainly can't tell an AI tool. Vythos adds four things on top of the documents you already keep: - **A single current version.** One document, one rule. Replace a rate card and the old one stands down with its history intact, rather than sitting beside the new one waiting to be quoted by mistake. - **Precedence.** A client's rule beats your house default, always, and your tools are told so explicitly. See [Clients and scope](/concepts/clients). - **Permissions that reach the tools.** A freelancer's AI tool gets your brand rules and not your rate card, because you decided that. See [Your team and their access](/using-vythos/team-and-access). - **Values that can be checked.** Where a rule states a figure — a day rate, payment terms, words never to use — a draft can be checked against it. See [Values](/concepts/values). ## What Vythos is not - **Not a document store.** Your files stay in Drive, in Notion, on your laptop. Vythos reads them and keeps the text it read, so it can answer and compare; it never becomes the place your documents live. - **Not a writing tool.** It doesn't draft your proposals. It gives whatever you write with the rules it must respect, and can check a draft afterwards. - **Not an approval queue.** There is no review workflow to maintain. A rule exists because someone with the right access pointed at a document. - **Not a detector.** It doesn't decide for itself which of your documents are rules. Whether an invoice is governance is not a judgement software should be making on your behalf. A person names the rule, always. ## Who it fits Vythos is built for creative and marketing agencies that run on their own standards — from a solo operator with a rate card and a tone of voice, up to a team of a dozen where different people need different access. It fits best when: - your rules already exist as documents, rather than in one person's head; - more than one person, or more than one AI tool, needs to follow them; - you work for several clients whose terms differ from your defaults. It's a poor fit if nothing is written down. Vythos governs documents; it can't govern an intention. If you're starting from nothing, write one page — your rate card — and start there. ## What you need - A Vythos workspace (you create one with an email address and a password). - Documents. Google Drive, Notion or files on your computer. - Optionally, an AI tool that supports MCP — Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf and others do. See [Connect a tool](/ai-tools/connect). ## Worth knowing before you start - **Only the workspace owner adds and retires rules today.** Teammates can be given access to *see* particular kinds of rule, in the app and in their AI tools. Letting a teammate add rules is coming; the invitation screen says so where you choose access. - **Rules can come from Google Drive, Notion or an upload.** Other sources — your website, GitHub, Gmail — feed memory, not the Playbook. - **Slack is listed in the app but isn't ready.** Don't connect it yet. ## Next [Quickstart](/getting-started/quickstart) gets you a workspace with real rules in it in about fifteen minutes. After that, [which documents to add first](/getting-started/which-documents-first).