HQ
HQ is the operational control area of Knotic.
It is where you look when you want visibility, configuration support, and system-level control rather than direct task execution.
What HQ Is For
Use HQ when you want to understand or manage the Knotic environment around your work.
HQ currently groups four views:
- Skills
- Monitoring
- Models
- MCP Servers
Open HQ with Ctrl+Alt+H.
How HQ Works
HQ is a container with multiple child views.
- Skills helps you work with reusable capabilities stored in the repository.
- Monitoring helps you inspect runtime activity and usage signals.
- Models helps you customize provider model lists.
- MCP Servers helps you inspect and control external MCP tool servers.
This makes HQ less like a chat surface and more like a control room for how Knotic behaves around the project.
How To Use HQ
Skills
Use Skills when you want repeatable workflows instead of retyping the same prompt pattern.
Workspace skills live in .knotic/skills/<slug>/SKILL.md. They can be invoked from Sessions and travel with the repository.
Monitoring
Use Monitoring when you want to review what Knotic has been doing and how expensive or active certain flows are.
Models
Use Models when you want to customize the available model lists for supported cloud providers. This view is for provider model list customization, not for downloading local GGUF binaries.
MCP Servers
Use MCP Servers when you want Knotic to access external tools exposed through VS Code's MCP infrastructure. HQ lets you inspect servers, see their tools, and start, stop, or restart them. It also gives you a direct path to .vscode/mcp.json.
How To Read The UI
Think of HQ as a grouped set of operational tabs inside one container.
- Skills: repository capabilities and templates
- Monitoring: activity and usage visibility
- Models: provider list customization
- MCP Servers: server state, tool explorer, and server controls
When To Use HQ
Open HQ when:
- you want to understand the environment around your work
- you need to inspect or adjust Skills
- you want to manage which models appear in the UI
- you need to connect or troubleshoot MCP-based tools