Agent skill · research science · jeremylongshore
brain
Answers questions about your own systems, notes, decisions, runbooks, and conventions from your governed knowledge brain, returning a qmd:// citation for every claim — receipts, not recall. Use when you want to know what your brain has captured about your own architecture, infrastructure, decisions, or conventions (e.g. "what does my system map say about the proxy", "why did I pick Apache-2.0", "what's my deploy runbook"). Trigger with "/brain", "ask the brain", "what do I know about", or "check my knowledge base".
Why this skill is useful
Provides a structured method for retrieving and citing governed knowledge that the AI wouldn't generate on its own.
What it needs
Requires bobs-big-brain, qmd installed locally. About 4k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-07. 2,604 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
Brain — cited answers from your governed knowledge base Ask your knowledge brain a question and get an answer grounded in your governed corpus, where every claim carries a qmd:// citation. The brain does not paraphrase from memory — it retrieves governed memories and cites them, so any answer is verifiable after the fact. Overview This is the read surface of Bob's Big Brain: your files are compiled into governed memories, governed by deterministic code, and retrieved with citations by Tobi's qmd (OSS). The brainsearch MCP tool fronts that retrieval. Your product surround is INTKB govern + ICO compile + this plugin — not a fork of qmd. The job here is to turn a natural-language question into a cited answer — and to refuse to answer beyond what the citations support. Prerequisites The bobs-big-brain / governed-brain plugin is installed (MCP governed-brain). Mode is automatic. In local mode (default) search runs in-process against your local ~/.teamkb index — no network, no API key; a compatible qmd binary must be available (prefer monorepo pin @tobilu/qmd via the Registrar / installer). Operators can use scripts/bbb-qmd from bobs-big-brain-registrar so XDG points at the team index, not personal ~/.cache/qmd. In team mode (TEAMKBAPIURL set) search proxies to the team brain. Every hit is a qmd:// citation. Instructions Step 1: Search the governed corpus Retrieval is Tobi's qmd (BM25 keyword via the MCP). Prefer short keyword queries over full sentences. 1. Derive 1–4 distinctive nouns/verbs from the user question (drop what/why/how, articles, auxiliaries, prepositions). 2. Call brainsearch with those keywords and scope: "curated" (default promoted knowledge). The tool returns { source, results: [{ citation, snippet, score, collection }] }. Each citation is a qmd://COLLECTION/FILENAME URI — the receipt for that hit. Empty-result ladder (do not stop after one miss): 1. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills jeremylongshore/brain