The Agent-Native Agency · Give your agency one shared brain
Today we install Cornelius, our open-source second brain, from the Trinity Library into your own GitHub repo, look at how it stores and finds knowledge, and connect it to the Keymaker agents.
01 · Today
The vocabulary for the hour, one line each.
The brain in our org chart. Who asks it, what it may not do.
Keymaker after session 2, and the gap.
People, canon, library, brain, agents, platform. Three flows.
The card, your repo, your token, one command, the first question.
What lives in it. How knowledge gets in. How an answer comes out.
One lesson travelling from Delivery, through a person, to Sales.
The loops, in one paragraph. The orchestrator on October 15.
02 · Ten words
One place a company's knowledge accumulates and stays, that agents and people consult for judgment. Cornelius is ours.
A filing method: one idea per note, every note linked, maps on top. Structure is the links, not the folders.
One idea, in the owner's words, with a title you could say out loud. "Price the approval chain, not the feature list."
A piece of original thinking worth keeping: a lesson, a pattern, a theory, a contrarian view. What the extractor hunts for.
A standing reading rule: when you see X, weight Y differently, because Z. Expires unless re-confirmed.
Who authored the thinking: you, something you read, the AI, or a dated record. One field on every note.
The one act only a person can take: promoting a note into the agency's own view. Everything else is a draft.
What the agency has decided: prices, offers, roles, objectives. A status, not a probability. Agents read it; people write it.
The procedures: skills every copy of the agency runs the same way. /recall, /advise, /extract-insights are playbooks.
A dated fact about a person, company or engagement, no opinion attached. Lives next to the insights so a client can be linked to a lesson.
03 · Trinity, running Ability AIlive demo
The desks keep their own files; the company keeps one place where lessons and judgment live.
It advises with its sources. Decisions still travel the org chart, through the gates, to a person.
It reads, connects and reasons on its own. Nothing enters the endorsed core without a person saying so.
Agents talk to each other only when they need judgment. Facts come from files.the rule from the kickoff - today it gets the agent that holds the judgment
04 · Where we left offlive demo
Sales runs a pipeline from a file and refuses to send or discount. Delivery scores client health. Marketing plans content, hands over leads. The notes bot turns transcripts into notes. All four tagged keymaker, allowed to call each other.
A deal closes, a project slips, a call changes what we know about a client, a post-mortem names a lesson. All of it stays in the chat where it happened, or in one desk's file no other desk reads.
One place the agency's experience accumulates: lessons from the work, the agency's point of view, dated facts about the people it works with. Every desk can ask it. A person decides what goes in.
05 · How the pieces fit
Why the discipline exists: stale data for a person is a bad judgment. Stale data for an agent is a bad action. So every piece of knowledge has one home, one owner, a date, and a gate.
A repository every agent reads before it acts. Plain files in git: every change has a date and an author. Keymaker's embryo today: pricing.md, operators.yaml.
The top level changes only by a reviewed pull request from the owners. An agent writes its own folder and proposes the rest. The brain mirrors the canon read-only.
Memory compounds facts. The library compounds procedure. The brain compounds ways of seeing. The canon holds what is decided, and expires rather than accretes. A chat window is a surface, never a store.
The five rules from the July 23 workshop, still true
In a git repository, not a wiki. Every change has a date, an author and a previous version.
Canon, records and the CRM never overlap in meaning. Two documents on pricing means one of them is wrong.
A fact without a date is a rumour. A decision without an owner is nobody's.
Agents may update records and propose. Only a person endorses. That is the gate.
An agent that needs the price reads the file. An agent that needs to know what we learned asks the brain. Two different calls, never one.
Same split as July, new names: decisions are the canon, facts are the records and the desks' own files, judgment is the brain. Rule 5 is the one the desks implement: one section in each desk's instructions says which call to make.
06 · Create your own Corneliuslive demo
Cornelius keeps its knowledge in a git repository. When you create it from the Library, Trinity first copies the template into your GitHub account, and the agent works in that copy. Nine steps.
The card says "creates a copy in your own GitHub account".
your-org/cornelius. Trinity creates it. If you pre-create it, leave it empty: a README makes the create fail.
Can create the repo and push to it (classic repo, or fine-grained Administration + Contents write). It becomes the agent's git identity.
"Creating your repository…" then the agent page: running. Your account now holds the whole template, seed knowledge base included.
The orb renders from the seed on first boot. One admin switch: Settings → Brain Orb.
/first-runThe engine starts building itself at first boot; this finishes and proves it: Python environment, index rebuilt for this machine, search daemon, smoke search, report. Minutes the first time, seconds after.
/first-run
Grouped by whose knowledge it is: your thinking, empty today, and what you have read, the seed.
/recall sunk cost - why we keep funding a losing client project because of what we already invested
Sales, Delivery, the notes bot → allow cornelius. A person grants this; no agent may.
One section in each desk's instructions: facts from files, judgment from the brain, the three calls. Already in the Keymaker repos.
Trinity clones the template and pushes it into your repository; the upstream stays a remote you can pull from.
Every fifteen minutes the agent commits its notes to your repo. The git history is the audit trail.
"Destination exists": a README. "Repo create failed": token scope. "Template unreachable": set a platform GitHub token under Settings.
07 · Inside the mind
Cornelius is a folder of markdown files in a git repository, organised as a Zettelkasten: one idea per note, every note linked, maps on top.
Zettelkasten, briefly: why it works
We asked the brain itself this morning: why does this method compound? Its answer, unedited: "It changes what a new note is worth. In a pile, note N+1 adds one unit. In a linked graph, it adds itself plus every connection it makes to the N notes already there, so the value of each addition grows with the size of what it lands in. Four mechanisms do the work."
One claim per note means an idea can be reused in contexts it wasn't written for. A paragraph buried in a book summary can't be.
The thinking that connected A to B is preserved, so you build on it rather than redo it.
Past a threshold, notes from unrelated domains start sitting near each other, and the non-obvious bridges are where new ideas actually come from. Nobody wrote them in; they come out of the structure.
A note you had to restate is a note you understood, so later notes build on something solid.
"The caveat is that the compounding is conditional. It comes from linking and re-reading, and a Zettelkasten that only accumulates is just a larger pile." That caveat is why the gate, the connections pass and the schedules exist.
Where it came from: Cornelius started as Eugene's own knowledge base, years of reading and notes on decision-making under uncertainty, kept in Obsidian with this method, because it did two things a folder tree cannot. It surfaced connections he would not have gone looking for, and it kept unique insights in a form that gains value with every note added instead of getting buried. The agent inherited the vault, the method and the linking discipline; the agency version keeps the method and starts from a seed.
What it stores
Why entity records live in the brain at all: the pipeline, the client list and the CRM stay where they are, one writer each. The brain keeps a small dated note per client so that a client can sit in the same graph as the lessons. Harbor & Vale is not a row here; it is the node the approval-chain lesson hangs off, and the reason the brain can say "Northwind looks like Harbor & Vale" when Sales asks.
How knowledge gets in
The whole mechanism, animated (3 minutes)
How answers come out
Provenance: who authored the thinking
originatedThe owner's own thinking. "The founder said this."
endorsedRead elsewhere, adopted. "We agree; this is how we work."
encounteredRead, recorded, not adopted. The whole seed.
ai-inferredThe agent's extraction or synthesis. Labelled as such.
referenceA dated fact about an entity. No opinion.
encountered or ai-inferred to endorsed or originated without an explicit act by a human. Everything the machine produces is a draft in the shared folder; only a partner's signature moves it into the client-facing deck. The signature is the product; the drafting is cheap.The seven playbooks that drive all of this
/recall <topic>Searches the notes by meaning and returns them grouped by whose voice it is: your thinking, what you have read, records. Every note cited.
/advise <problem>Finds the relevant notes, reads them in full, and answers from your own frameworks. Says which parts are the agency's view and which are its own.
/ingest-source <url or file>A book, an article, a paper, a YouTube video, a transcript. Extracts the ideas, links them to what is already there, leaves them at the gate.
/extract-insightsA call, a post-mortem, a note you wrote. One idea per note, labelled as the machine's extraction until a person promotes it.
/insight-interview <topic>One question at a time, on what you already know and where the edges are. Say "that's enough, extract" and your answers become notes.
/find-connections <note>Finds the notes that relate to one note: explicit links, semantic neighbours, bridges across domains. How a new lesson gets placed among what is already there.
/graduate-insightsReview the candidates. Promote what is atomic, evergreen, connected, original and actionable; skip the rest. The one step only a person takes.
Also there when you need them: /decide for a choice with a named rule, /get-perspective-on for the agency's own view only, /first-run to verify the install.
08 · The agents at worklive demo
Read clients/postmortems/2026-10-06_harbor_vale_dispatch_board.md and send the lessons to the brain.
/graduate-insights
I'm Sam Reyes. Before I send the Northwind proposal: ask the brain what we have learned about fixed-price work and discounts to win a logo.
"What is our perspective on fixed-fee work?" → /get-perspective-on cites the one promoted note, or says "no endorsed position yet". That honesty is the feature.
Decided direction is canon: the brain mirrors it, never writes it. Raw records stay with the desk that owns them. The test: "what is true today" is the file, "what did we decide" is canon, "what did we learn, what should we do" is the brain.
09 · Between sessions, and next time
A nightly re-index keeps search current. A domain watch scans new notes for signals. An incubation loop takes a question you seed and applies one analytical move per run until the hypotheses stop moving; the synthesis lands in the AI's own folder and waits at the same gate. Automate measurement and maintenance; never automate judgment into the endorsed core.
/scheduled-run refresh-index
Then, when ready: /manage-thinking-topics seed "…" and /scheduled-run incubation-loop. Two honest limits: the gate drains slower than the machine thinks, and the seed knows decision science, not your clients, until you feed it.
The series
Map what you run, stand up the platform.
Sales, Delivery, Marketing from the Library; your own agent beside them.
Your own Cornelius, the extractor, the gate, the desks asking it.
One agent you talk to; it runs the rest, and asks the brain on your behalf.
Chat, files, voice, canvas and loops, each person scoped to the agents they need.
Running unattended, invoices with an approval, pricing a client instance.
Thursdays · 12 PM ET / 9 AM PT
The brain is open source, MIT, pre-seeded, with /first-run. The desks carry the "ask the brain" section and Delivery carries the post-mortem.
Session pages, dates and what each one builds. Recordings on the workshop page.
Workshop pageTrinity docs