OM DENNE EPISODE
Sash drives this one, and he does not start with the tool. He starts with the failure. He was running Claude Code across two Macs, so his first move was the obvious one: put his intelligence folder of Markdown context files in a git repo and sync it to both machines. That worked until it did not. Every session ended with a push he had to remember, and every session started with a pull he had to remember, and forgetting either one meant an agent was working from yesterday's truth. Then he added a Hermes agent on a Hostinger VPS, then revived an old OpenClaw agent on another one, and suddenly there were four agents and no shared understanding between them.
The fix was not better discipline, it was a different layer. Sash looked at Obsidian vaults and Karpathy's LLM Wiki before landing on gbrain, the open-source project from Y Combinator's Garry Tan, which Tan describes on the repo as "the production brain behind my OpenClaw and Hermes deployments." gbrain sits on top of the git repo as a semantic layer: it chunks the Markdown, indexes it into Postgres with pgvector, and exposes an MCP endpoint agents can query. The git repo stays the durable source of truth and stays human-editable. What changes is retrieval. Instead of loading CLAUDE.md plus status.md plus decisions.md into every context window, an agent asks gbrain for the chunk that matches the task and pulls more only if it needs it. That is the moment Chris stops the demo to repeat it back, because just-in-time context is the part that actually changes a working day.
The second half is the part most people skip, which is access. Sash runs three agents against one brain with deliberately different permissions: Nuro is the only thing with write access to the git repo, Kyra has full read/write on gbrain but read-only on the repo, and Blaze can only read the course-related slice and cannot see client work at all. His framing is that this is not novel, it is just how you build an IT team - help desk does not get admin on the database, engineers do. Sash closes with the smallest version worth doing: if you run one agent and nothing always-on, hand the gbrain repo to Claude Code or Codex, point it at the files you already work in, and describe the thing your agent keeps forgetting.
Key takeaways:
- Put the durable source of truth in a git repo of plain Markdown you can still open and edit by hand, then treat gbrain as an index on top of it rather than a replacement for it.
- Stop loading whole context files into every session. Wire a hook so the agent queries the brain for the chunk the task needs, and let it pull the full page only when the chunk is not enough.
- Separate the three things an agentic system needs: context lives in the brain, canonical instructions stay in CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md, and tools are wired per agent.
- Decide read versus write per agent before you connect the second one. Give exactly one agent write access to the source repo and scope every other agent to the slice it actually needs.
- If you are starting cold, do not install it by hand. Give the gbrain repo URL to Claude Code or Codex, tell it what your agent keeps forgetting, and let it work out the setup and the sync job.
Watch the video version on YouTube · Full show notes, transcript + takeaways
