Imported from gabrielmoreira/agent-skills-mirror (
mirrors/repos/cosmicstack-labs@mercury-agent-skills/categories/ai-ml/gbrain-lite/SKILL.md). Install upstream withnpx skills add gabrielmoreira/agent-skills-mirror --skill gbrain-lite. Copyright stays with the author.
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
.mdfile - News entries by date:
news/YYYY-MM-DD/
Workflow
- Trigger check — Book/person/concept/news mentioned in conversation → proactively check brain
- Search — Full-text search in
brain/directory (ripgrep/grep) - Decide
- Existing entry → reference it, update if needed
- No entry + important → create immediately
- No entry + uncertain → ask user
- Create — Write
brain/{type}/{slug}.md- Slug: lowercase/hyphenated
- Must include YAML frontmatter (title, type, date, tags, summary)
- Cross-reference — Update
linksfield in related entries - 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
titleanddate - Don't skip the
summaryfield — search and listing depend on it - Don't manually write
updated— it auto-updates on save - News entries must use
item_idas 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_idfield when creating news entries - Fix: Always include
item_idfor news entries, validated in creation workflow
References
references/garry-tan-gbrain-inspiration.md— GBrain system design reference