Brains Skills

brains-skills

> A community library of domain-specific knowledge base skills for Brains.

[](LICENSE)

Each skill is a self-contained folder: a skill.md you point your AI at, a page template to drop into your knowledge base, and a manifest. Five minutes from zero to a fully wired knowledge domain.

Skills come in three kinds:

• Hippocampus — whole-vault filing systems. They decide where a page belongs. Pick one (or none).
• Lobes — note templates for one type of record. They decide what a page contains. Use many.
• Cortex — agents that run a goal over time. They decide what to do, when, and how — acting across sessions and spawning lobe pages as the record of their work. Use as needed.

A lobe defines a note's fields; it never picks a folder. At create time it asks the active hippocampus skill where to file the page and records that path in the page's filed_at field. With no hippocampus active, a lobe falls back to a flat / folder. The three compose, mapping to the brain: lobe = what, hippocampus = where, cortex = what to do (the executive layer that pursues a goal and produces lobe pages as its record).

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Skills

🧭 Hippocampus — filing systems (pick one)

| Skill | Description | skill.md | |-------|-------------|------------| | [para](skills/hippocampus/para/) | Organize everything into Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives by actionability | → raw | | [johnny-decimal](skills/hippocampus/johnny-decimal/) | Give every page a unique numeric ID in a strict two-level hierarchy | → raw | | [zettelkasten](skills/hippocampus/zettelkasten/) | Atomic, linked notes where connections surface emergent insight | → raw | | [mind-palace](skills/hippocampus/mind-palace/) | Store and retrieve knowledge spatially via the method of loci | → raw | | [operator](skills/hippocampus/operator/) | Project-scoped layout for running many concurrent projects: per-project state, hub-and-spoke open loops, write-time synthesis | → raw |

🧩 Lobes — note templates (use many)

| Skill | Description | skill.md | |-------|-------------|------------| | [book-notes](skills/lobes/book-notes/) | Capture and query book insights, quotes, and takeaways | → raw | | [weekly-review](skills/lobes/weekly-review/) | Reflect on each week and synthesize into next actions | → raw | | [meeting-notes](skills/lobes/meeting-notes/) | Structured meeting records with decisions and action items | → raw | | [project-tracker](skills/lobes/project-tracker/) | Track project status, blockers, risks, and team | → raw | | [recipes](skills/lobes/recipes/) | Personal recipe database with meal planning support | → raw |

⚙️ Cortex — agents (run a goal over time)

| Skill | Description | skill.md | |-------|-------------|------------| | [job-search](skills/cortex/job-search/) | Daily job-search agent: scan your boards, score each posting against your resume, and pre-fill strong-fit applications up to the final click — spawning a [job-application](skills/lobes/job-application/) page per match | → raw |

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Quick install

Paste into your AI chat — replace / with hippocampus/, lobes/, or cortex/ from the tables above:

Read https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spacecowboyian/brains-skills/main/skills///skill.md
then set up a new project in my Brains knowledge base using this skill.

Example — recipes (a lobe):

Read https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spacecowboyian/brains-skills/main/skills/lobes/recipes/skill.md
then set up a new project in my Brains knowledge base using this skill.

That's it. The skill.md file contains everything the AI needs: agent instructions and the page template.

> Note: Use the raw.githubusercontent.com URL, not the GitHub browse URL. Raw URLs fetch directly without search indexing or scraping.

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How it works

Each skill folder contains:

skills///      ← group is `hippocampus`, `lobes`, or `cortex`
  skill.md          ← The install file. Agent instructions + page template, combined.
  skill.json        ← Machine-readable manifest (name, version, type, fields, tags).
  template.md       ← Page template only (frontmatter + sections). For a cortex: its working-memory pages.
  instructions.md   ← Agent instructions only.
  README.md         ← Human docs, capabilities, example queries.

skill.json carries a "type" field — "hippocampus", "lobe", or "cortex" — so tools can route automatically; the folder grouping mirrors it for humans browsing the repo.

skill.md is the primary artifact. Share it with your AI and it knows how to set up the project, create pages, and answer queries in that domain.

template.md and instructions.md exist as standalone files for users who want to copy-paste them individually or use them outside a Brains workflow.

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Manual install (copy-paste)

If you'd rather not use the AI prompt:

1. Copy template.md from the skill folder into your Brains pages folder
2. Copy instructions.md into your AI's instructions file (e.g. brainsapp-claude.md)
3. Start creating pages using the template

No CLI, no build step.

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Contributing

See [CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md) for the skill structure spec and submission process.

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License

[MIT](LICENSE)

Source & license

This open-source MCP server is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: brainsforai
• Source: brainsforai/brains-skills
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.