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Gbrain Lite

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gbrain-lite

Gbrain Lite is an Agent Skill for documents published in the cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills repository on GitHub: a SKILL.md instruction file an AI agent can load to do this task.

Lightweight personal knowledge base — markdown + YAML frontmatter structured notes with full-text search and cross-referencing for AI agents

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QUICK START

How to use this skill

Bring this guide into your coding agent with a prompt tailored to the tool you use.

  1. Open your project in Codex.
  2. Copy and paste the prompt below.
  3. Review files and risks before approving any action.
Prompt to paste
Inspect the Agent Skill at https://github.com/cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills/blob/HEAD/categories/ai-ml/gbrain-lite/SKILL.md and all supporting files. Report provenance, permissions, scripts, dependencies, and security risks. Propose an exact installation into .agents/skills/gbrain-lite, but wait for my approval before writing files or running scripts.

Copying this prompt does not install or run the skill. Review third-party files before use.

GBrain Lite — Lightweight Personal Knowledge Base

Organize books, people, concepts, and news items from conversations into a searchable, cross-referenced markdown knowledge base.

Workspace

  • Knowledge base directory: brain/
  • Subdirectories by type: books/ people/ meetings/ ideas/ articles/ projects/ news/
  • One entry = one .md file
  • News entries by date: news/YYYY-MM-DD/

Workflow

  1. Trigger check — Book/person/concept/news mentioned in conversation → proactively check brain
  2. Search — Full-text search in brain/ directory (ripgrep/grep)
  3. Decide
    • Existing entry → reference it, update if needed
    • No entry + important → create immediately
    • No entry + uncertain → ask user
  4. Create — Write brain/{type}/{slug}.md
    • Slug: lowercase/hyphenated
    • Must include YAML frontmatter (title, type, date, tags, summary)
  5. Cross-reference — Update links field in related entries
  6. Sync — Keep key entry index in agent memory

Rules

  • Don't dump long content directly into agent memory — prefer brain
  • Don't create entries without title and date
  • Don't skip the summary field — search and listing depend on it
  • Don't manually write updated — it auto-updates on save
  • News entries must use item_id as dedup key (format: github:owner/repo / hn:12345 / arxiv:url)
  • Don't do full overwrite updates on existing entries — use targeted patches

Validation

  • New entry has complete frontmatter (title, type, date, tags, summary)
  • Full-text search finds the new entry
  • News entries contain item_id + first_seen + star_history (GitHub entries)
  • Agent memory usage below 90%, otherwise trigger distillation to brain

Pitfalls

Brain vs Memory confusion

  • Symptom: Long-form content consumed all agent memory space
  • Root cause: Everything dumped into memory instead of brain
  • Fix: >500 chars → brain entry; memory only keeps index pointers. (Fixed: 2026-05-12)

Missing item_id on news entries

  • Symptom: Duplicate news entries accumulate, dedup impossible
  • Root cause: Agent skipped item_id field when creating news entries
  • Fix: Always include item_id for news entries, validated in creation workflow

References

  • references/garry-tan-gbrain-inspiration.md — GBrain system design reference