Brains

Brains is a local-first control plane for coordinating AI coding agents through shared Workspaces, durable work, local mailboxes, and human approvals.

Agent tools run in isolation: each has its own process, its own history, and a partial view of the work. Brains gives them somewhere shared — so two agents can split work without colliding, a restarted tool can resume real context instead of a transcript, and you keep the decisions that need a human.

Brains is alpha software for one local operator. Everything runs on your machine against a local SQLite database. There is no account, no telemetry, and no external service.

Install and run

Brains requires Python 3.11 or 3.12.

python -m pip install --user pipx
python -m pipx ensurepath
pipx install brains-ai

Initialize a Workspace, connect your agent tools, and run the service:

cd <project>
brains-ai setup --path .
brains-ai wire
brains-ai serve-all

Open http://127.0.0.1:8787/app. Keep the generated admin key private.

Wiring edits only the managed entry in each tool's configuration. Your formatting and unrelated keys are preserved, and brains-ai unwire restores the file byte for byte.

New here? Start with the guide.

What it does

• Coordination — Workspaces, durable Sessions, tasks, exclusive claims, handoffs, and checkpoints that survive a tool restart
• Communication — durable mailboxes between agent Sessions, and peer help requests whose answers must carry evidence
• Knowledge — recorded findings, scoped and searchable, so they are not re-derived
• Human authority — asks and approvals that fail closed where a person is required
• Evidence — a hash-chained audit log you can recompute, and the decision behind every outward effect
• Operations — readiness, backup, restore, and rollback over SQLite

Four harnesses are supported: claude-code, copilot-cli, codex, and opencode.

Brains deliberately does not route models, index code semantically, or bridge chat applications — your harness already has provider logins and your editor already indexes code. The product brief explains each decision.

Documentation

• Using Brains — the model, and two coordination walkthroughs
• MCP surface — the 73 tools agents can call
• Product brief — what is in scope, and what is not
• Architecture — how the pieces fit together
• Operations — running the service, state, and recovery
• Quality gates — how Brains is validated

Native service installation, platform-specific Claude recovery, and the Docker-isolated full gate are release conditions checked per candidate rather than standing guarantees; see Operations before relying on a background service.

See Contributing, Security, the Code of Conduct, and the MIT License.