Give the agent you already use a memory you control. GBrain stores explicit facts with their sources, supports corrections and withdrawal, and makes the same memory available across your agents.
> /plugin marketplace add garrytan/gbrain> /plugin install gbrain@gbrain
Repo: garrytan/gbrain
What's inside
Give the agent you already use a memory you control. GBrain stores explicit facts with their sources, supports corrections and withdrawal, and makes the same memory available across your agents. Start with keyless memory and keyword retrieval; add semantic search, synthesis, and background enrichment when you need them.
Grok Bot and Grok Build are different products. Muse's personal agent and Muse Code are different products too. Muse already has native editable memory; GBrain adds an explicit, portable record with provenance and shared access. See each guide's dated evidence and remaining verification steps.
I'm Garry Tan, President and CEO of Y Combinator. I built GBrain to run my own AI agents. It's the production brain behind my OpenClaw and Hermes deployments: 155,795 pages, 24,589 people, 5,340 companies, 66 cron jobs running autonomously. My agent ingests meetings, emails, tweets, voice calls, and original ideas while I sleep. It enriches every person and company it encounters. It fixes its own citations and consolidates memory overnight. I wake up smarter than when I went to bed — and so will you.
It works as a company brain too. Each person on the team gets their own slice of the brain, scoped by login. When you query, you only see what you're allowed to see — never another person's notes, never another team's data. We fuzz-tested this across every way you can read the brain (search, list, lookup, multi-source reads) and got zero leaks. Drop GBrain in as your team's shared institutional memory — the company-brain shape on YC's Request for Startups. If you're building in that space, you might as well build on this. Tutorial: set up GBrain as your company brain →
Lots of personal-knowledge systems give you keyword matching and grep in a box. GBrain does that, and adds two things nobody else ships together:
attended, works_at, invested_in, founded, advises) with zero LLM calls. Ask "who works at Acme AI?" or "what did Bob invest in this quarter?" and get answers vector search alone can't reach. Benchmarked: P@5 49.1%, R@5 97.9% on a 240-page Opus-generated rich-prose corpus, +31.4 points P@5 over its graph-disabled variant and over ripgrep-BM25 + vector-only RAG by a similar margin. Full BrainBench scorecards live in the sibling gbrain-evals repo.The point of building a 150K-page brain is to use it as a strategic moat. To never lose context. To query what's in your own head without re-reading it. The brain layer is what makes the moat usable. The 24/7 dream cycle is what keeps it sharp. Both run on your hardware, your DB, your keys.
It's easier to ship a daemon that runs 24/7 to ingest, enrich, and consolidate than it is to keep an agent in chat working hard. GBrain is that daemon, generalized. Install in 30 minutes. Your agent does the work. As my personal agent gets smarter, so does yours.
Start keyless. Your harness subscription and any separately configured model API usage are different costs. The optional personal-agent bootstrap takes about 15 minutes; always-on enrichment needs its own compute and API configuration.
LLMs: fetch
llms.txtfor the documentation map, orllms-full.txtfor the same map with core docs inlined in one fetch. Agents: start withAGENTS.md(orCLAUDE.mdif you're Claude Code).
Say you have a meeting with Alice tomorrow. You want to walk in remembering what she works on, when you last talked, and what's still open between you. Here's what you'd type, and what you'd get back.
You ask:
"What do I need to know before my meeting with Alice tomorrow?"
Most personal-knowledge tools give you back a list of pages. Something like:
1. people/alice — Alice runs engineering at Acme...
2. meetings/2026-03-15-alice-q1 — Q1 product review with Alice...
3. meetings/2026-01-08-acme-kickoff — Kickoff meeting with Acme team...
4. customers/acme — Acme is a series-B fintech we work with...
5. notes/2026-04-22 — Quick chat with Alice about pricing...
Five pages you now have to open and read yourself to actually prepare. The tool found the right material, but it didn't do the work.
GBrain gives you back the answer, with sources:
Alice runs engineering at Acme (a series-B fintech). You last spoke
on April 22 in a quick pricing chat. Three things are still open
from that conversation:
1. She owes you the security review for the new tier
(deadline was May 1; no update since).
2. You committed to pricing for a 500-seat tier
(you sent it April 25; no response yet).
3. She mentioned they're hiring a CISO; you said you'd intro
someone from your network.
Heads up: nothing's been added to the brain about Alice or Acme
since April 22, six weeks ago. She may have replied through email
or Slack DM, channels the brain doesn't see. Worth asking her to
catch up before assuming any of this is still current.
Every claim has a source page behind it. The "heads up" at the end tells you what the brain doesn't know yet, so you can ask Alice about it directly instead of being surprised. The brain just did your meeting prep.
This is the difference between a search engine and a brain. Search finds the pages. The brain reads them for you and writes the answer.
Requires Bun 1.3.11 or newer. Existing worker installations should follow the authorization and queue upgrade guide before restarting services with this version.
[!WARNING] GBrain is NOT distributed on npm. The npm package named
gbrainis an unrelated package with no connection to this project. Do not runnpm install -g gbrainorbun add -g gbrain— you'll get something else, and it can shadow the real binary on your PATH. Install and upgrade ONLY via the documented paths below (bun install -g github:garrytan/gbrain, orgit clone+bun install && bun link). If you already ran the npm install by mistake:npm uninstall -g gbrain/bun remove -g gbrain, then reinstall from GitHub.gbrain doctordetects a shadowing npm install and prints the fix.
Start with the agent you already use. For Grok Bot and Muse, the dedicated guides above install an isolated launcher, repairable runtime, and memory in a verified persistent directory. For a coding agent, paste:
Add GBrain memory to this existing agent. Read and follow:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/garrytan/gbrain/master/INSTALL_FOR_AGENTS.md
Keep my current identity and instructions. Start keyless, preserve unrelated
configuration, and use the memory-only path. Do not create a personal-agent
identity or private repository. Show me the required search-mode choice.
Verify a unique remember/recall/correction/withdrawal round trip using observed
GBrain calls, then tell me how to verify recall in a new conversation.
Codex guide · Claude Code guide · Memory-only walkthrough · CLI standalone.
The following bootstrap paths are optional: use them when you want GBrain to help create a new persistent personal agent, including identity files and a private repository.
Turn Codex into your persistent personal agent. (Just want the brain + skills without the full agent? codex plugin marketplace add garrytan/gbrain@codex-plugin then codex plugin add gbrain@gbrain — see docs/mcp/CODEX.md. The paste block below builds the whole agent.) Works in the ChatGPT desktop app (open Codex on a folder) and in the Codex CLI (codex in a terminal) — same install, same result. Open Codex in a new, empty folder (not an existing code project) — that folder becomes your agent's own private GitHub repo, which bootstrap creates and privacy-verifies for you. Then paste:
Read and follow every step of:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/garrytan/gbrain/latest-stable/BOOTSTRAP_FOR_AGENTS.md
Goal: set yourself up as my persistent personal agent in this folder, with gbrain
as your memory. Interview me before writing any identity file — never invent
answers. Ask before anything destructive. You are not done until
`gbrain bootstrap verify` exits 0.
Codex will ask for command approvals during the install — approving them is the sandbox working as intended. What you get, in about 15 minutes: a short interview (6 required questions) → your agent's identity (SOUL.md, USER.md, MEMORY.md) rendered from your own answers, never invented → a local PGLite brain (2 seconds, no server, no Docker) → MCP wired so every session can search and write memory → a private GitHub repo, created and privacy-verified, as your agent's durable body. Works with zero API keys — keyword search plus memory your agent writes itself; one optional key upgrades capabilities (OpenAI: semantic search + automatic fact extraction; Voyage: semantic search; Anthropic: fact extraction). Codex reads brain context through its tools each turn (pull-based). The click moment: tell it one small thing to remember, restart Codex, then ask for it back — the answer comes from the brain, not from this chat's context (which the restart cleared). That cross-session round-trip is the whole product; "what's my name / my top jobs?" is answered from your identity files, which is nice but not the same trick.
Two things worth understanding once it's running: you own the brain — the repo holds managed source files, while the database also holds facts, corrections, jobs, and accounting. A Git clone alone is not a complete backup; use complete backup and restoration — and the first skill to run is cold-start: say "fill my brain" and your agent imports your Gmail, calendar, and contacts — via the native connector (gbrain google setup, tokens in gbrain's local credential vault, never held by the agent), via ClawVisor (a hosted OAuth gateway), or from offline archives like Google Takeout — one consented step at a time. An empty brain is a database; a filled one is a memory.
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View @garrytan’s profile"I don't think I've typed like a line of code probably since December, basically, which is an extremely large change." — Andrej Karpathy, No Priors podcast, March 2026 When I heard Karpathy say this, I wanted to find out how.
@garrytanFAQ
gbrain is a Claude Code plugin with 77 hand-picked skills for data work, indexed on Flowy. Install it with the command on its page. It includes brain-ingest-gate, brain-link-discipline, brain-ops. Its skills do not fire on their own yet. Request auto-invocation to have Flowy route them as you prompt. Free and open source.
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