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What is a Fragment Type

Update: Sourced from Usable Live (2025-10-23) — Fragment Types session. See summary and full transcript linked at the end.

What is a Fragment Type

A Fragment Type is a classification system that helps organize and categorize knowledge fragments within Usable workspaces. Fragment types provide semantic meaning to your content, making it easier to find, filter, and understand the purpose of each piece of information.

🎯 Purpose

Fragment types serve several key purposes:

  • Organization: Categorize knowledge by its nature and intended use
  • Discoverability: Enable filtering and searching by content type
  • Context: Provide immediate visual and semantic cues about a fragment’s purpose
  • Workflow: Support different workflows based on content type (e.g., troubleshooting vs. learning)
  • Customization: Allow workspaces to define custom types for domain-specific needs

📚 Standard Fragment Types

Usable provides five default fragment types that cover most common use cases:

1. Knowledge

Icon: 🧠 Brain
Color: Blue
Purpose: General information, documentation, and reference material

When to use:

  • Conceptual explanations (“What is X?”)
  • Background information and context
  • Documentation and guides
  • Definitions and glossaries
  • Reference material

Examples:

  • “What is a Usable Workspace”
  • “Understanding OAuth 2.0”
  • “Company coding standards”
  • Technical specifications

2. Recipe

Icon: 👨‍🍳 Chef Hat
Color: Green
Purpose: Step-by-step guides, tutorials, and procedures

When to use:

  • Tutorial content with sequential steps
  • “How to” guides for humans
  • Onboarding procedures
  • Setup instructions
  • Workflows and processes

Examples:

  • “How to Create a Workspace”
  • “Setting up a React development environment”
  • “Onboarding new team members”
  • “Publishing a blog post workflow”

Key difference from Instruction Set: Recipes are written for humans to follow, while Instruction Sets are for LLMs to execute.

3. Solution

Icon: 💡 Lightbulb
Color: Yellow
Purpose: Solutions to specific problems and troubleshooting guides

When to use:

  • Bug fixes and resolutions
  • Troubleshooting guides
  • Problem-solution pairs
  • Postmortems and incident reports
  • Workarounds and patches

Examples:

  • “Fixing CORS errors in Next.js API routes”
  • “Resolving database connection timeout issues”
  • “Ticket #123 resolution: Critical bug in checkout flow”
  • “Workaround for Safari rendering issue”

Why this matters: Solutions turn resolved problems into searchable knowledge, preventing teams from solving the same issue multiple times.

4. Template

Icon: 📄 File Type
Color: Purple
Purpose: Reusable code patterns, project templates, and boilerplates

When to use:

  • Code snippets and patterns
  • Project scaffolding templates
  • Configuration file templates
  • Reusable prompts
  • Boilerplate code

Examples:

  • “React component template with TypeScript”
  • “API endpoint boilerplate”
  • “Docs capture prompts for livestreams”
  • “Docker compose configuration template”

5. Instruction Set

Icon: ✅ List Checks
Color: Orange
Purpose: Automated workflows and instructions for LLMs to execute

When to use:

  • Multi-step automation workflows
  • LLM-executable procedures
  • Automated setup scripts
  • Repeatable automation patterns
  • Agent workflows

Examples:

  • “Setup new project with dependencies and configuration”
  • “Generate weekly report from workspace data”
  • “Create CRM entry from email automation”
  • “Process and categorize incoming support tickets”

Key difference from Recipe: Instruction Sets are designed for LLM execution, while Recipes are for human reading.

🎨 Custom Fragment Types

Workspaces can define custom fragment types to match domain-specific needs. Examples from real implementations:

  • CRM: Customer relationship entries
  • Time Entries: Time tracking records
  • Projects: Project management artifacts
  • Tickets: Issue tracking and support requests
  • Content Briefs: Content planning documents
  • Blog Posts: Published or draft articles
  • Retrospectives: Project retrospectives and lessons learned
  • Plan: Strategic plans, roadmaps, and milestones
  • PRD: Product requirements documents

🧭 Choosing the Right Fragment Type

Use this quick decision tree:

Is it executable by an LLM?
├─ Yes → Instruction Set
└─ No → Is it solving a specific problem?
    ├─ Yes → Solution
    └─ No → Is it step-by-step instructions for humans?
        ├─ Yes → Recipe
        └─ No → Is it reusable code or patterns?
            ├─ Yes → Template
            └─ No → Knowledge

Simple picker:

  • “How to…” for humans → Recipe
  • “Fix…” or “Resolve…” → Solution
  • “What is…” or “Understanding…” → Knowledge
  • Reusable code/patterns → Template
  • LLM should execute → Instruction Set
  • Strategic planning → Plan (if custom type exists)
  • Feature requirements → PRD (if custom type exists)

🔗 Related Concepts

  • What is a Fragment: Understanding the atomic unit of knowledge in Usable
  • What is a Usable Workspace: How workspaces organize and scope fragments
  • Creating a Workspace: Getting started with your first workspace
  • Tagging Strategy: How tags complement fragment types for organization

💡 Why This Matters

Fragment types transform an unstructured collection of notes into an organized knowledge system:

  • Faster Discovery: Filter by type to find exactly what you need
  • Clear Intent: Understand a fragment’s purpose at a glance
  • Better AI Results: LLMs can better understand and retrieve relevant content
  • Workflow Support: Different types enable different workflows (learning vs. troubleshooting)
  • Scalability: As your workspace grows, types keep it navigable
  • Knowledge Compounding: Properly typed content builds on itself over time

📊 Fragment Types in Practice

From the Clarity case study (Usable Live Week 41), a complete business platform used these fragment types:

  • CRM entries → Custom CRM type
  • Time tracking → Custom Time Entries type
  • Project plans → Custom Projects type
  • Support tickets → Custom Tickets type
  • Content planning → Custom Content Briefs type
  • Published content → Custom Blog Posts type
  • Lessons learned → Custom Retrospectives type

This demonstrates how fragment types scale from personal knowledge management to complete business systems.

Sources: Compiled from Usable Live sessions (Oct 2025), particularly the “Docs From Context” session and Week 41 Clarity case study.

Updated from Usable Live (2025-10-23)

This page was updated based on the Usable Live session focused on the five default fragment types and how we use them in practice, including auto-generating docs for the Astro JS site.

  • Summary: “Usable Live - 2025-10-23: Granola Summary - Fragment Types”
  • Full transcript: “Usable Live - 2025-10-23: Transcript (Fragment Types)”
  • Key additions: clarified purpose of defaults, human vs LLM focus (Recipe vs Instruction Set), examples of custom types (e.g., Gmail in CRM).