brain — Signpost to the Brain

Pointer skill. The brain interface lives in the /aide:brain slash command — this skill exists so any agent that needs brain access discovers it.

What the brain is

The brain is a knowledge store that lives external to the project and outside any single codebase. It can be a personal store for one developer or a shared store an entire team points at — when teammates wire their agents to the same brain, every member's agent reads and writes against the same playbook, research, project context, and conventions. That makes it the authoritative source for anything the team has agreed on or learned, and the place where new findings become reusable across projects and across people.

Typical contents: domain research, the coding playbook, project history and context, journal logs, environment config, identity, references. AIDE's research phase writes to it; the strategist and architect phases read from it; explorer agents draw on it for context the code doesn't carry. The brain is a logical surface — the underlying backend is an implementation detail the /aide:brain command abstracts.

When to invoke /aide:brain

Trigger when the current task needs knowledge that isn't in the working directory:

• Unfamiliar domain. You're about to make a decision in a domain you have no loaded context for (e.g. cold email tactics, local SEO scoring, a vendor API quirk).
• Shared context referenced. The user says "check the brain," "what does the team do for X," "we already researched this," or names a project / research area / convention without giving you the file.
• Saving findings. You produced research, a decision, or a pattern the team will need again — synthesis the brain should own, not the repo.

What /aide:brain does

It discovers the brain's root navigation surface first — the brain owns its own structure and navigation rules — then follows those rules to find and return content (or write what it's been asked to save).

When NOT to use this skill

• Coding conventions, patterns, architecture decisions — use study-playbook. It's scoped to the playbook subset of the brain.
• First-time brain wiring — that's /aide:brain config, and /aide routes to it directly when the brain isn't wired yet.
• Web lookups, repo file searches, MCP memory — the brain is the external knowledge store wired to this project. Use the appropriate tool for those other surfaces.