The four movements

sync       resource → catalog        pull references in
analyze    content  → understanding  per thing, by kind
search     catalog  → you            one index across everything
export     catalog  → resource       bytes back out

Four movements. Everything else in the codebase is access layer, auth, or deployment for these. All four are reachable over /mcp, which is what the product is for.

sync — resource → catalog

Pull references in. A sync walks a resource’s enumerator and records what it finds as things, without moving any bytes. Enumerators are a type concern, because the cursor shape differs per dialect: S3 continuation tokens, Drive page tokens, Gmail history ids, IMAP UID ranges valid only within a uidvalidity.

Sync is resumable at the item, so a hundred-thousand-object walk survives a deploy. See Sync a resource.

analyze — content → understanding

Fetch content the catalog does not own, understand it, and record that understanding on the thing. What runs is decided by the thing’s kind — pdf, email, image, xlsx — through a handles? dispatch where the first match wins.

Analysis is a step machine, and it is resumable within a thing as well as across them. See Analysis.

search — catalog → you

One index across everything, which is the whole point. OpenSearch is the query path; Postgres is the system of record. The index is designed for millions of things per tenant: cursor pagination, no count(*), and a per-tenant filtered alias doing the isolation that row-level security cannot reach.

See Search the catalog.

export — catalog → resource

Bytes back out. An export selects things and writes them to a storage resource — the reverse of sync, and the reason the catalog is not a trap. Like sync, it checkpoints, so an interrupted export resumes rather than restarts.

See Export things back out.

One form covers sync and export

They look like different features and they are the same one, with the endpoints swapped:

sync all data from [ source ] to [ destination ]   every [ interval ]
[ ] make it a thing        (unchecked: just do the dumb copying)

source	destination	make it a thing	is
Drive	—	✓	ingest — references only
Drive	B2	—	backup
Drive	default storage	✓	ingest + materialize
things matching q	B2	—	export

The catalog is never a destination; cataloguing is a flag. “Make it a thing” is the cost switch — unchecked is bytes moving, checked is analysis per item.