How it fits into Compound Engineering The Best Practices Explorer appears in this channel's material as a subagent inside the Compound Engineering plugin [^45fde771-1fa4-5519-a1bd-1c6cdabd8394@0]. It is used within the planning and work teams — the stages of Compound Engineering's plan → work → review cycle — where it searches the categorized markdown knowledge files and pulls relevant discoveries in as research. The point of doing this via a subagent is to keep the main context window clean: knowledge is brought in only when it is relevant, never inserted wholesale into the prompt [^45fde771-1fa4-5519-a1bd-1c6cdabd8394@1212]. What it actually does in practice In Kieran Klaassen's setup (visible in Kora's repository), the Explorer effectively tells the working agents: “we've done this before, stick to it; see this document for detail.” It works because the knowledge base behind it is structured for retrieval: - Markdown files organized by category — brainstorm, research (post-mortems), and solutions (best practices, developer-experience notes, integration issues). - Metadata on each file so agent search can find the right documents. So the Explorer is the retrieval side of knowledge accumulation — it is what makes captured best practices resurface at the moment they matter, instead of polluting every prompt [^45fde771-1fa4-5519-a1bd-1c6cdabd8394@1212]. - The Best Practices Explorer is a subagent in the Compound Engineering plugin, used inside the planning and work stages. - It searches categorized markdown knowledge files (with metadata) and brings relevant findings in as research. - Its purpose is to apply past best practices without wasting main context — documents are pulled in only when relevant, never pasted wholesale into the prompt.