Build on Brains
Brains is an agentic work platform built on a single memory layer: your brain. Your brain holds your email, calendar, Drive, chats, and notes as queryable pages. On top of that memory you can build four kinds of objects that turn passive memory into active work:
- Boards: typed, queryable datasets. Lists, trackers, CRMs, pipelines. Each board carries its own little memory (rows + schema + skills + dashboard) that you, your team, and your agents share.
- Automations: sandboxed TypeScript that runs on a schedule with scoped access to your brain. Cron jobs with judgment.
- Mini-sites: sandboxed HTML attached to a brain. One-pagers, dashboards, intake forms, decks, custom admin panels, or anything you'd otherwise build in a notebook and never share.
- Integrations: the inputs and outputs to the outside world. Gmail, Calendar, Drive, GitHub, Monday, Telegram, and anything else you plug in via a recipe.
Everything in Brains is built on a single low-level surface: the MCP server. Every UI affordance and every automation talks to the same MCP tools. That means whatever the product can do, you can do too: in code, from your own automation, or from your own LLM session over the Model Context Protocol.
How to read these docs
Start with Boards if you want to track or model something. Move to Automations when you want that tracking to run on a schedule. Open Mini-sites when you want to render or share what you've built. Reach for Integrations when you need to pull from or write to an external system — or build your own integration as a recipe.
Each page covers the concept, the mental model, and how to build and customize. Code snippets are concrete, so you can copy them into an automation, a mini-site, or a custom recipe.
The fastest path to "I built something"
Open the app, start a chat with Claude in any brain, and ask:
"Create a board for tracking job applications."
Claude will run the create_board_flow playbook: purpose, schema,
seed rows, optional skills, optional dashboard. You'll have a working
board in under five minutes. The same shape works for automations
(create_automation_flow) and mini-sites (create_mini_site).
The rest of these docs are for when you want to know exactly what the playbook is doing, and how to do it yourself.
How the four primitives fit together
| Primitive | Holds | Runs | Sees |
|---|---|---|---|
| Board | Rows + schema + skills | Manually or on a recipe schedule | Brain members; sharable |
| Automation | A main.ts Deno script |
On cron, in a sandbox | Whatever its tool_grants allow |
| Mini-site | One HTML document + optional chat | Each load, sandboxed in an iframe | The data inlined at build time, plus any board it's bound to |
| Integration | A recipe (declarative or sandboxed) | On a cron or on demand | Your account on the external service |
A typical full-stack pattern: an integration ingests data into pages and a board, an automation enriches the board on a schedule, a mini-site renders the board as a one-pager or interactive admin panel.