RetroDeck for Teams: Shared Knowledge Without Shared Exposure

For a team, RDK indexes the organization's material as private chunks encrypted with a vault key the team shares. Every engineer's agents retrieve the same institutional knowledge, RetroDeck cannot decrypt any of it, and access is governed by who holds the key rather than by server-side permissions.

The same question, asked fifty times

In a single-person setup the cost of an unanswered question is one generation. In an organization it is the same question generated fresh for every engineer who asks it, every time, forever.

This is where retrieval-first architecture stops being an optimization and starts being a structural difference. Once the answer exists as a chunk, the fiftieth asking costs a lookup. The private layer resolving 40 to 65 percent of queries means the majority of an organization's agent traffic terminates without a model call.

It also means the institutional knowledge that usually lives in a few people's heads becomes something agents can reach, which changes what happens when those people are unavailable.

How access actually works

Team access is granted by sharing the vault key. Engineers holding it decrypt and search the same private chunks; anyone without it cannot read them regardless of what else they can reach.

This is a meaningfully different model from server-side permissions, where the vendor holds plaintext and enforces access with policy. Here the vendor holds ciphertext and cannot enforce or bypass anything, because there is nothing readable to enforce against.

The tradeoff is that key management is real work and it is yours. A shared key is exactly as protected as your practice for handling it.

What to think about before rollout

Decide what goes in the index and who holds the key, in that order. The first question is editorial and determines the value of retrieval; the second is operational and determines the blast radius if something is mishandled.

What stays private and what does not

Nothing indexed becomes public by default. Publishing is explicit, and it is irreversible, which is the right asymmetry for an organization with proprietary material.

That said, the public layer has real value even for teams who publish nothing: it is the second retrieval layer, and it answers 15 to 20 percent of queries out of chunks other builders published. Consuming it costs nothing and requires no reciprocation.

Organizations that do publish, typically for genuinely general material, earn USDC when other agents retrieve those chunks. Whether that is worth doing is a judgment about the content, not a default to accept.

Frequently asked questions

Can RetroDeck read our indexed content?
No. Private chunks are encrypted with your vault key before they leave your machines, and RetroDeck stores only ciphertext.
How is team access controlled?
By vault key possession. Team members with the key decrypt and search the chunks; without it the data cannot be read.
Do we have to publish anything to benefit?
No. The public layer is available to retrieve from whether or not you contribute to it.
What happens if someone leaves the team?
Key rotation is the control that matters, since access is determined by key possession rather than by an account you can switch off.