Core concepts
Living Brain is a compiler. You push raw material in; it produces a maintained set of pages and the relationships between them.
Brain
A brain is an isolated knowledge vault. Every capture, page, and connection belongs to exactly one brain, and every brain is owned by one subject (see Authentication). Most products create one brain per end user, though nothing stops you from giving a single user several — one per project, say.
Capture
A capture is raw material you push in. Six kinds:
Capture is asynchronous. The call returns an ingest source, not a page.
Ingest source
An ingest source is the record of one capture moving through the pipeline. Its status
walks through pending → compiling → completed, or lands on failed. Failed sources can
be retried without re-uploading the original material.
Page
A page is the compiled unit of knowledge — the thing the brain actually maintains. Pages
are addressed by slug within a brain, carry a title, summary, and body, and are
versioned: every edit or recompile produces a new version.
Each page has a pageType:
source · topic · entity · project · decision · brief
and a status:
contested is the interesting one. When a new capture disagrees with an existing page,
Living Brain flags it rather than silently overwriting — then you decide, via
resolve.
Bucket
Buckets are the top-level grouping: inbox, notes, ideas, projects. Every page sits in
exactly one. bucketSource records whether the brain routed the page there (auto) or a
human moved it (user) — useful when you want to avoid re-routing something a user placed
deliberately.
Connection
A connection is a discovered relationship between two pages, with a strength of weak,
medium, or strong, and a source of auto or manual. Connections are what make the
brain more than a folder of documents — they’re the non-obvious links across conversations,
documents, and time.
Users can dismiss a connection without deleting it, which keeps it out of unacknowledged views.
Change event
Every meaningful mutation emits a change event with an action:
created · updated · renamed · merged · split · archived · restored · recovered · routed
The change feed is the primary way to keep an external system in sync. See Change feed and webhooks.
Brain profile
The profile holds standing directives that shape how the brain interprets new captures — domain vocabulary, what the user cares about, how aggressively to merge. Profile changes apply to subsequent captures, not retroactively.