company-brain

Point it at a folder of company documents and ask questions in any language. It returns the matching passages verbatim, each with file:line citations, from the command line or to Claude over MCP.

30-second start

git clone https://github.com/hysteric-lab/company-brain && cd company-brain
python3 -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install -e .
bash scripts/fetch_demo_corpus.sh                 # 4 pages of GitLab's public handbook
.venv/bin/brain --db demo.db ingest demo/corpus
.venv/bin/brain --db demo.db ask "What is the sick leave policy?"

That works with no API key, on keyword search alone. To ask in other words or another language, set a Voyage AI key and run ingest again. The second run adds vectors to the existing index; it does not rebuild it.

export VOYAGE_API_KEY=...
.venv/bin/brain --db demo.db ingest demo/corpus
.venv/bin/brain --db demo.db ask "員工請病假的規定是什麼？"   # Chinese question, English handbook

Needs Python 3.11+ whose sqlite3 can load extensions (sqlite-vec is one). Homebrew's and uv's Pythons can; the python.org macOS installer cannot, and brain says so and names the fix. With uv: uv venv --seed --python-preference only-managed --python 3.12 .venv.

ask prints each passage under a header like people-group/time-off-and-absence/time-off-types.md:L129-148. When nothing relevant is found, it prints No matching passages in the knowledge base. and exits with status 1.

Related MCP server: vectorise-mcp

How it works

 .md / .txt files ──► ingest ──► SQLite file
                        │          ├─ documents  (path, sha256, text)
                        │          ├─ chunks     (1200 chars, 200 overlap, line_start/line_end)
                        │          ├─ chunks_fts (FTS5, trigram tokenizer: works for CJK too)
                        │          └─ vec_chunks (sqlite-vec, voyage-3.5-lite, 1024-d)
 question ──► FTS5 bm25 ─┐
          └─► vector KNN ─┴─► reciprocal-rank fusion (k=60) ─► top N passages + file:line

• Re-ingest is incremental. Files are compared by sha256. Changed files are re-chunked, deleted files lose their chunks and vectors, and unchanged files are skipped.

• Missing vectors are backfilled. Ingest first without a key, then run it again with one, and the chunks that have no vectors get embedded.

• No key means keyword search only. Without VOYAGE_API_KEY, ingest and ask still run, and stderr prints one line saying so. A keyword hit needs a passage that contains the question's content words, so paraphrases and cross-language questions need the key.

• How "no answer" is decided. A vector hit counts only within MAX_VEC_DISTANCE. That value was calibrated on the demo corpus, the measurements are in src/company_brain/config.py, and the gap was narrow, so recalibrate on your own documents. A keyword hit needs every content word of the question (English stopwords and punctuation ignored), or, for a question written without spaces such as Chinese, at least two thirds of its 3-character fragments. If neither kind of hit survives, the answer is empty.

• A typo'd ingest path is an error (exit 2), not "everything was deleted".

• Files that are not UTF-8 or cannot be read are skipped with a warning instead of aborting the run. A file that was indexed before and has since become unreadable is removed from the index.

Use it from Claude (MCP)

brain mcp serves one tool over stdio, search_company_knowledge(query, top=5). It returns [{path, lines, text}], and its description tells Claude to say "no answer" when the list is empty. The server does retrieval only: Claude writes the answer from the returned passages, so no Anthropic key is needed here.

claude mcp add company-brain -- "$PWD/.venv/bin/brain" --db "$PWD/demo.db" mcp

Claude skill

skills/company-brain/SKILL.md tells Claude how to answer from the knowledge base. It searches, re-queries in English when the question is in another language, quotes the passage verbatim with path:lines, and says plainly when the documents have no answer. Copy it to ~/.claude/skills/company-brain/ to use it.

Measured on 2026-10-28 with the demo corpus: three questions, each run once with the skill and once without, all graded by script. Two questions were in Chinese: one about an airport taxi expense and one about bringing a dog to the office, which the documents do not cover. The third was in English, about bereavement leave. With the skill, all 11 checks passed. Without it, 9 of 11 passed. The two misses were the same check in both answered questions: without the skill, Claude cited path:lines but paraphrased the policy instead of quoting it, so a reader could not check the wording. Both versions answered "not in the documents" for the dog question. The skill costs about 31% more tokens per answer. With one run per question, this is a smoke test, not a benchmark. The questions, the run and grading scripts, and every answer with its per-check evidence are in skills/company-brain/evals/.

Run record (2026-10-28, Claude Code, demo corpus)

Question asked: GitLab 員工請病假要通知誰？用 company-brain 工具查，回答時引用檔案與行號。 ("Who must a GitLab employee notify when taking sick leave? Use the company-brain tool and cite file and line numbers.")

Claude called search_company_knowledge twice ("sick leave who to notify", "unable to work due to illness notify manager") and answered as follows. The answer is verbatim; a local status table that the author's own Claude Code configuration appends to every reply has been cut from the end.

GitLab 員工請病假要先通知誰，看病假連續幾天：

連續 1–5 天：通知你的直屬主管。 people-group/time-off-and-absence/time-off-types.md:129-148 原文：

1. Notify your manager of your absence. Please note that you do not need to disclose any medical information …

2. Enter the time away in Workday by selecting the label "Out Sick"

通知主管之後，在 Workday 用「Out Sick」標籤登記這段時間，Time Off by Deel 會自動同步。少於 6 天不用交病假單，除非你所在國家的法規另有要求。

連續 6 天以上：算「留職停薪（leave of absence）」，通知對象看你在哪個國家。 time-off-types.md:142-155：

• 美國：透過 Okta 進入 Tilt 提交請假申請，大約 2–5 個工作天會排好你的個人請假計畫。

• 其他國家：在 Compass 開單通知 Absence Management Team（請假管理組），一樣要在 Workday 登記「Out Sick」，並依當地規定附上醫療證明，例如醫師證明或 fit note。

病情細節要不要講： time-off-types.md:161-179 寫明，病情要跟主管和 People Business Partner（人資夥伴）講多少由你自己決定。如果你不想講，Absence Management Team 只會告訴主管請假日期，主管也不得把任何病情細節告訴其他同事。

另外有兩點：

• 請假是為了照顧生病的家人時，適用 Caregiver Sick Time（照顧者病假）規定（time-off-types.md:196-229）。通知對象一樣，1–5 天找主管，6 天以上開 Compass 單。差別在 Workday 標籤要選「Caregiver Sick Time」。

• 文件開頭註明：所在國家法定的通報規定永遠優先於上面這些流程（time-off-types.md:129）。

Check: lines 135–136 of time-off-types.md read 1. Notify your manager of your absence. … and 1. Enter the time away in Workday by selecting the label "Out Sick".

Tests

.venv/bin/pip install -e ".[dev]"
.venv/bin/pytest -q -m "not integration"            # offline: no network, no key
BRAIN_INTEGRATION=1 VOYAGE_API_KEY=... .venv/bin/pytest -q -m integration

The offline suite uses a deterministic bag-of-words embedder. It covers incremental re-ingest, backfill, FTS query escaping, CJK queries, empty results, citations that map back to file lines, the CLI, and the MCP tool. The integration suite asks Chinese questions against the English handbook and checks the expected page is in the top 3. It also checks that held-out off-topic questions return nothing; those questions were not used for calibration.

Demo corpus

scripts/fetch_demo_corpus.sh downloads four pages from GitLab's public handbook when you run it. The pages are pinned to one commit so that the line numbers quoted above stay valid. They are not committed here: the handbook repository's LICENSE grants MIT for "the GitLab Software" and does not spell out terms for the handbook text, so this repo links to the source instead of redistributing it. All handbook content belongs to GitLab B.V.

Licence

Apache-2.0 (this code). The demo corpus is not covered, see above.