Brain Ops

This is the operational contract for how Claude should interact with a personal knowledge base. It enforces a brain-first lookup protocol: check what you already know before hitting external APIs, write back everything you learn with inline source citations, and maintain bidirectional links between entities. The key insight here is treating the knowledge base as an ambient context layer rather than a separate retrieval step. Every conversation becomes a read-enrich-write loop. User statements are treated as the highest-authority data source. The iron law is back-linking: every mention of an entity must create a link from that entity's page. Useful if you're building a persistent context system and want consistent conventions around citation, enrichment timing, and graph maintenance.

skills.sh installs: 419
GitHub stars: 32.3K
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add garrytan/gbrain --skill brain-ops --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Brain Operations — The Ambient Context Layer

Recall relevant context before responding. Save explicit requests with provenance; automatic capture is off until the user opts in. Reading this skill does not enable capture, delegation, or paid enrichment. A chat-only instruction suppresses writes for that turn, including when standing capture is enabled.

Convention: See skills/conventions/brain-first.md for the lookup chain and copyable retrieval filters. Convention: See skills/conventions/quality.md for citation and back-link rules.

Contract

This skill guarantees:

Brain is checked BEFORE any external API call (brain-first lookup)
Explicit save requests and opted-in inbound signals trigger the READ → WRITE loop; enrichment requires its separately configured authority
Every outbound response checks brain for relevant context
Source attribution on every fact written (inline [Source: ...] citations)
User's direct statements are highest-authority data
Back-links maintained on every brain write (Iron Law)

Iron Law: every mention of a person or company with a brain page gets a back-link FROM that entity's page TO the page mentioning them.

SKILL.md on GitHub