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Quick Start

Installation

pip install brainlayer

Optional extras

pip install "brainlayer[brain]"     # Brain graph visualization (HDBSCAN + UMAP)
pip install "brainlayer[cloud]"     # Cloud backfill (Gemini Batch API)
pip install "brainlayer[youtube]"   # YouTube transcript indexing
pip install "brainlayer[ast]"       # AST-aware code chunking (tree-sitter)

Setup

Run the interactive wizard:

brainlayer init

This will:

  1. Check for Claude Code conversations in ~/.claude/projects/
  2. Detect your hardware (Apple Silicon → MLX, otherwise Ollama)
  3. Configure your LLM backend for enrichment
  4. Create the database at ~/.local/share/brainlayer/brainlayer.db

Index Your Conversations

brainlayer index

This parses your Claude Code conversations (JSONL files), classifies content, chunks it with sentence boundaries, generates embeddings (bge-large-en-v1.5), and stores everything in the SQLite database.

Connect to Your Editor

Claude Code

Add to ~/.claude.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "brainlayer": {
      "command": "brainlayer-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Cursor

Add in Cursor's MCP settings:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "brainlayer": {
      "command": "brainlayer-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Zed

Add to settings.json:

{
  "context_servers": {
    "brainlayer": {
      "command": { "path": "brainlayer-mcp" }
    }
  }
}

VS Code

Add to .vscode/mcp.json:

{
  "servers": {
    "brainlayer": {
      "command": "brainlayer-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Enrich (Optional)

Add structured metadata to your indexed content using a local LLM:

brainlayer enrich

This adds summary, tags, importance scores, intent classification, and more to each chunk. See Enrichment for details.

Verify

brainlayer stats              # Check your knowledge base
brainlayer search "auth"      # Test a search

CLI Reference

brainlayer init               # Interactive setup wizard
brainlayer index              # Index new conversations
brainlayer search "query"     # Semantic + keyword search
brainlayer enrich             # Run LLM enrichment on new chunks
brainlayer enrich-sessions    # Session-level analysis
brainlayer stats              # Database statistics
brainlayer brain-export       # Generate brain graph JSON
brainlayer export-obsidian    # Export to Obsidian vault
brainlayer dashboard          # Interactive TUI dashboard