Import an existing notes or docs folder

You rarely start from nothing. You may already have a docs/ tree, a folder of scratch notes, an exported wiki, or a pile of NOTES.md files. mage can onboard that knowledge — but it will never paste it in verbatim. A mage note is insight plus procedure plus pointers, never a copy of a source. So importing a folder means distilling it, one source at a time, into notes you confirm — see Notes for what that shape is.

The one move

Inside Claude Code, run the mage:learn skill pointed at the folder:

mage:learn --from ./docs

The --from <path> argument can be a directory or a single file. The skill walks the folder, classifies each ingestable source, drafts a distilled note for each — the reusable insight, the procedure, and pointers back to the original file, not its full text — and writes only the ones you confirm. As with every capture path, the redaction gate scrubs each draft before it can touch disk, and you commit.

Preview what would be ingested

mage:learn --from is driven by a deterministic manifest you can inspect first. The read-only mage ingest plumbing verb enumerates and classifies the sources under a folder without writing anything:

# What would be picked up, as a human-readable list
mage ingest ./docs

# The same manifest as JSON, for tooling
mage ingest ./docs --json

Nothing is created until you run mage:learn --from and accept the drafts.

Onboarding agent memories instead of a folder

mage:learn --from is for files you point it at. If instead you have pre-existing Claude Code memories that you want to fold into mage, that is a different entry point: mage adopt collects in-shape captures into the capture inbox and reports the out-of-shape ones for you to run through mage:learn --from. It is plan-first and never commits.

mage adopt --dry-run     # show the plan; write nothing
mage adopt               # place in-shape captures into the inbox

After importing

Imported notes flow through the same path as any other: review the drafts, accept the keepers, and they land in notes/ and get re-indexed. Then commit them yourself — see Stage and groom for the review step and Install and Quickstart for the commit.