Knak is a no-code email and landing-page builder that
generates on-brand assets from your own design system and syncs them to your
marketing automation platform.
Connected here, the agent can turn an email request in Slack into a finished,
on-brand asset in about two minutes — with approved copy reproduced verbatim and
the org's naming convention applied.
Worth being explicit, because it is the thing that makes this work:
Knak writes the email. It owns the brand design system, the themes, the
layout, and the HTML. The agent writes the brief. It parses the request,
resolves the brand, campaign, and theme, applies the naming convention, and
reports the result.
The agent never composes email HTML. A generic model writing email HTML produces
something off-brand that breaks in Outlook.
KNAK_API_KEY=...This is a service credential, so every asset the agent creates is owned by
that identity rather than by whoever last signed in. That is deliberate: assets
created by a bot should not disappear from view when an employee leaves.
Knak also exposes an MCP server behind OAuth. This integration deliberately does
not use it — the token expires and needs re-authorizing per deployment URL, and
assets end up attributed to whoever authorized it.
Optional, but it is the difference between "build me an email" working and the
agent having to ask where to put it every time.
KNAK_DEFAULT_BRAND=Acme
KNAK_FOLDER_PATH=Campaigns/LifecycleA "campaign" in Knak's API is an asset folder, and folders nest. The path is
walked one segment at a time under the brand, because the brand-scoped folder
list returns only the top level — and because the id in a Knak UI URL is not the
API id, so you cannot just paste one in.
If a name does not resolve, the error lists the folders that were actually there,
which is usually enough to spot the typo.
A theme is the brand design system an email is generated against. Selected by
name for the same reason as folders:
KNAK_DEFAULT_THEME_NAME=Standard Email
KNAK_NEWSLETTER_THEME_NAME=Newsletter TemplateWhen a request mentions "newsletter", the newsletter theme is used; otherwise the
default. Leave both unset and Knak falls back to the brand's own default, which
is a perfectly good starting point.
Set KNAK_DEFAULT_THEME_ID to skip the name lookup if you already know the id.
Knak cannot rename an asset after it is created. Not through the API, not in
the UI. So the name is applied at generation time from a token template:
KNAK_ASSET_NAME_PATTERN={region}_{type}_{brand}_{title}_{date}_{ticket}Tokens: region, type (Email → em, Nurture → nur), brand, title,date (YYYYMMDD), ticket. Empty tokens collapse rather than leaving __ gaps,
and spaces inside a token become hyphens, so "AI SDK Launch" stays one field.
The ticket token is the one people skip and later wish they hadn't — it is what
lets you trace an asset back to the request that produced it, and there is no way
to add it afterwards.
npm run agentFreeform, when there is no copy yet:
Build a Knak email announcing our new usage-based pricing page. Short, one CTA
to acme.com/pricing.
Structured, when copy has been approved — paste the whole request:
Build this email:
Logo: Acme
Region: NAMER
Type: Email
Subject Line: Introducing usage-based pricing
Pre-header: Pay for what you use, nothing more
Body Copy: Starting today, every Acme plan bills on actual usage...
CTA Button Text: See the new pricing
CTA Button Link: https://acme.com/pricing
Target send date: 2026-09-14
The second path reproduces the copy verbatim. That matters more than it
sounds: a generative builder's instinct is to tighten the headline, add a
testimonial block, or fill a perceived gap with placeholder text, and all of
that is wrong once copy has been through review.
agent/lib/knak/brief.ts assembles the generation prompt deterministically, and
most of it is prohibitions. Each line is there because something went wrong
without it:
| Instruction | What it prevents |
|---|---|
| "do not rewrite, summarize, paraphrase" | approved copy getting "improved" |
| "include only the sections listed" | invented testimonial and speaker blocks |
| "no placeholder or lorem-ipsum text" | gaps filled with filler |
| "leave every divider as the theme defines it" | a specific recurring style drift |
| subject is "inbox subject ONLY" | the subject also rendered as an H1 in the body |
| links "must display the link text" | Watch the recording rendering as the bare URL |
If you fork this, treat those as load-bearing. Deleting one to make the prompt
read better reintroduces exactly the failure it names.
get_knak_asset_html writes the rendered HTML to the workspace and returns the
links, so the agent can check the things that actually go wrong — every link
resolving with correct and consistent UTMs, subject and preheader present, no
placeholder text left behind. Pair it with parse_tracking_url.
The agent/skills/email-build.md skill walks the whole workflow and loads
automatically when someone asks for an email.
It does not send. It creates an asset in Knak. A human publishes or syncs it
to the marketing automation platform and sends from there. That boundary is
deliberate.
It does not handle the Knak → MAP sync webhook. Knak can POST anasset.sync_requested webhook when someone publishes, which a custom MAP
integration receives and pushes into Marketo, Eloqua, Customer.io, or similar.
That is install-specific enough that it is not in the box; if you need it, the
pieces are a webhook route verifying the knak-signature HMAC, a fetch of the
asset's content_link, and a PATCH /sync-statuses/{id} reporting the outcome.