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Under the hood
You don't need any of this to use Pencel — but if you're curious why it behaves the way it does, three ideas explain most of it.
Compiler-based workflows
When you Build a workflow, Pencel keeps three jobs separate: it plans with a model, compiles that plan into concrete runnable steps with no model (deterministic and repeatable), then runs it as a guarded briefing the agent follows. Guardrails are enforced by the system, runs use a frozen snapshot, and Pencel checks what actually happened afterward.
There's a lot to this — see the dedicated Agentic compiler & runtime page for how each stage works and why it's built this way.
Dynamic UI
Some of what you see isn't hardcoded screens — it's generated from structured data, which is why new capabilities can show up without a new app version.
- Interactive panels during a run. When an agent needs a decision or structured input, it requests a panel — an approval prompt, a confirmation, a review, or a rich form with dates, quantities, and line items — and pauses until you respond. These panels are described by a schema and validated before rendering, not free-form UI.
- Data-driven Pulse cards. Records that workflows produce (opportunities, drafts, and other pack-specific items) render through a single generic card driven by a descriptor — which fields to show, which Pulse tab they land in, and what one-click action they offer. A solution pack adds a descriptor, not a new screen, so its records appear automatically once it's installed.
The everyday app chrome — sidebar, settings, editors — is ordinary, fixed UI. "Dynamic" applies to these schema- and record-driven surfaces.
Building a knowledge graph from your files
When you connect a local folder as a Knowledge vault, Pencel does two distinct things:
- Imports the documents. It walks the folder and stores each file as a searchable document, tracking changes so re-syncing only touches what changed. This part is fast, and your edits in-app are preserved on the next sync. Retrieval runs on a keyword/full-text index — grounded in the literal content of your files.
- Builds the graph — in the background. Separately, and without blocking you, Pencel reads through new or changed sources and extracts the entities (people, projects, organizations), claims (facts stated about them), and relationships it finds, linking each back to the source document as evidence. Over time this forms a graph you can browse, and that agents can traverse when answering.
Graph building is deliberately conservative — it prefers to extract nothing over inventing connections — and it runs incrementally as your files change (a periodic refresh, on by setting). The result is a picture of your workspace built from your own material, with every claim traceable to the file it came from.