Open Brain
When you're not holding it all in your head, there's more room to create.
More than I could hold in my head.
I always have more going at once than I can hold in my head — several projects, each with its own live thread: what was decided, what's half-built, what I meant to circle back to. Keeping all of it loaded is its own kind of work, and it's the kind that crowds out the part I actually care about — making the next thing.
The cost showed up every time I came back to something. Reload the context, rebuild the picture, find my place — then, finally, five minutes of real work. The ideas were never the problem. Holding onto them was.
I built it like infrastructure, not a feature.
The fix was to stop holding it in my head and give the remembering a home outside it. Not memory bolted onto a session — that version forgets the moment the session ends. Memory is an asset, and like any asset it has to be maintained, not just accumulated. So the system runs three loops, not two — capture, retrieval, and maintenance. The third is the one most memory systems skip, and the one I didn't realize how much I'd lean on.
The principle followed from the reframe: anything worth building for a product team's data pipeline is worth building for yourself. Not a monolith — a system with clear component responsibilities and MCP as the connective tissue. Built on the shoulders of Nathan Jones' Open Brain.
Three loops, one bank.
Capture flows in on the outer ring — every day, ambient. Retrieval flows back on the middle ring — every conversation. Maintenance runs on the innermost — slower, deliberate, the loop that keeps the bank true. It's the part of the system you don't see running, and the part you stop noticing you rely on.
The diagram puts the memory store at the center on purpose — everything else orbits it. The inner ring is drawn heaviest because it's the one that matters most: the quiet maintenance work that keeps the memory accurate, even though you never see it run.
I made it prove itself, every session.
For a stretch of an important build, the system looked like it was working — and was saving nothing. By the time I caught it, hours of good work were gone, and the frustration was real. A piece of it had quietly stopped firing, and because nothing errored, nothing told me.
So I built a health check. Every session now tests the whole pipeline end to end — capture, storage, retrieval — and if any part is broken, it says so loudly before I do a minute of work. The fix wasn't more storage. It was making the system prove itself, every time — because a memory you can't trust is worse than no memory at all.
Seven projects in six weeks.
With the remembering handled, I could keep more in motion than I could hold in my head. In six weeks the record shows real work across seven projects — a geology knowledge graph, a branding persona tool, the memory system itself, this site, a design system, a family photo archive, and an active job search.
| Project | What it is | Active days |
|---|---|---|
| Coherence Engine / In the Room | Branding persona tool | 29 |
| OpenBrain | This memory system | 16 |
| Job hunt | Search + applications | 15 |
| Exploration Graph | Geology knowledge graph | 12 |
| Portfolio site | This site | 7 |
| Family history | Family photo archive | 4 |
| Design system | Brand + glyphs | 3 |
The count isn't the point. With the remembering handled and my ideas out of my head, I could drop straight into the work and stay there — no rebuilding where I left off. That's the real payoff: flow.
The work follows me.
The same brain is there from my laptop, my desktop, and my phone. An idea I catch at night is waiting on whatever machine I sit down at in the morning.
Exploration Graph runs on exactly that. I build it at my desk and query it from an iPad in the field, off the same memory — and new projects plug into the same place. The work doesn't care which device I'm on.
Context that comes back to you is what turns a pile of ideas into a body of work.