Ask Mecatl about itself
A running agent carries a short account of what Mecatl is and where this
documentation lives, so you can ask it how the product works instead of reading
up first. Ask "what are the available modes in mecatui?" or "what does posture
auto allow?" and you get a direct answer, not a search of whatever project you
happen to have open.
The account covers the whole product, so it answers for mecatui, mecated,
mecak8s, and mecatequi by name, not only for Mecatl as a project. A question
naming a component is still a question about the agent itself.
Availability
Every ordinary session you talk to carries the account, on every deployment. It
comes from the server that builds the session rather than from a client feature or
an operator setting, so a session with no filesystem answers these questions the
same way a local mecatui session does.
Subagents and analysis sessions
are the exception. A delegated task worker is scoped to its own job, and an
analysis session opened with mecatui debug is scoped to reading another
session's evidence; neither carries the account, so ask the session directly
rather than through a subagent or an analysis session.
What the agent knows on its own
The account covers the structure of Mecatl rather than its details: what each component is, that permission modes and operator postures are separate controls with separate value sets, that guardrails are a third and independent control, and how this documentation is organized. That is enough to frame a question correctly and to keep the two permission controls apart, which is the distinction most worth getting right. Permissions and posture owns the full treatment of both controls, and the agent points you there.
A question the account already covers gets answered from it, with no tool call and no web search. The agent treats its own documentation as a known address to read rather than something to search for.
The account deliberately stops at structure. Flags, defaults, and exact behavior live in the documentation, which stays authoritative, so there is only one copy of them to keep current.
How the agent answers deeper questions
For anything past that structure, the agent reads the relevant page from the documentation site and answers from what it read, naming the page it used so you can follow up. You get the answer, not a referral.
Reading a page needs the WebFetch tool, which the built-in permission rules
allow by default. A session without web access answers from the account it
carries, tells you which part it is not certain of, and names the page that
settles the question.
Why the agent skips your workspace
Questions about Mecatl are not questions about your code, so the agent does not search the open workspace for Mecatl's own documentation. The project you have open is usually unrelated to Mecatl, and finding nothing in it says nothing about how Mecatl behaves. When Mecatl's own source is the project you have open, the agent searches it like any other codebase.