brain-v42

Persistent memory for coding agents, served over MCP.

brain-v42 gives Claude Code, Codex and any other MCP client a durable second brain: decisions, learnings, code snippets, runbooks, ADRs, tickets and project roadmaps — stored in PostgreSQL, retrieved by full-text + semantic search with reranking, and consolidated every night by an agent pipeline.

• Typed knowledge, not a notes dump — a decision records its WHY and alternatives; a snippet records its intent; a runbook records executable steps. Each type has its own lifecycle (supersession chains, ADR acceptance, learning validation).

• Explicit session lifecycle — the user owns every session boundary. Sessions capture the artifacts they produced, and closing is fail-closed: a session ends with either captured knowledge or an explicit "nothing to capture" reason, never silence.

• Search that ranks — pgvector semantic search + PostgreSQL FTS, fused and re-ranked by a cross-encoder.

• Nightly consolidation ("dream") — an agent pipeline cleans orphan links, merges duplicates, synthesises learnings and proposes promotions, behind per-phase killswitches that all ship closed.

• Multi-project — per-project focus with compare-and-swap revisions, roadmaps, cross-project tickets.

Architecture

Claude Code / Codex (MCP client)
       │ HTTP loopback :8765/mcp (production) · stdio (dev/fallback)
  brain-v42 (FastMCP)
       ├── SQLAlchemy async ─▶ PostgreSQL 16 + pgvector   (source of truth)
       ├── HTTP ─────────────▶ embedding endpoint :8003   (optional, pluggable)
       ├── HTTP ─────────────▶ :8003/rerank               (optional reranker)
       └── bolt ─────────────▶ Neo4j 5 Community          (relationship index, optional)

MCP transport: production = HTTP loopback http://127.0.0.1:8765/mcp; configuration default and dev/fallback = stdio.

PostgreSQL is the single source of truth. Neo4j is a disposable projection fed by a relational ledger/outbox — it can always be rebuilt from PostgreSQL, never the other way around. The canonical path is active in production since 22 July 2026; design and evidence live in docs/ARCHITECTURE.md and the graph ledger runbook.

Embeddings are optional and pluggable. The server itself is model-agnostic: it only speaks a three-route HTTP contract (POST /embed, POST /embed/query, POST /rerank) and degrades gracefully when the endpoint is away — brain_search falls back to full-text search, writes persist with a NULL embedding and are backfilled later. Any server implementing that contract works. The bundled reference stack (services/) serves Qodo-Embed-1-1.5B as GGUF via llama.cpp on a local GPU. EMBEDDING_DIMENSION is chosen at install time; switching models later means re-embedding the corpus (scripts/regen_embeddings.py).

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/hawkixs/brain-v42 && cd brain-v42
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"

# 1. Local Neo4j secret (skip if you run without the graph)
install -d -m 0700 .secrets
read -rsp "Neo4j password (same value as NEO4J_PASSWORD in .env): " PW
(umask 0022; printf 'neo4j/%s\n' "$PW" > .secrets/neo4j-auth); unset PW

# 2. Databases (PostgreSQL 16 + pgvector, Neo4j)
docker compose up -d

# 3. Migrations
export POSTGRES_URL="postgresql+asyncpg://brain:REPLACE_WITH_PASSWORD@localhost:5433/brain"
BRAIN_ALEMBIC_ALLOW_PROD=1 alembic upgrade head

# 4. Run the MCP server (stdio)
python -m brain_v42.mcp.server

Wire it into Claude Code — .mcp.json at the repo root already targets the production HTTP loopback endpoint; for a plain stdio dev setup:

claude mcp add brain-v42 -- python -m brain_v42.mcp.server

BRAIN_ALEMBIC_ALLOW_PROD is required only when the database name is exactly brain; keep it a one-command opt-in, never exported persistently. Alembic rejects DSN query parameters; use the plain form above with host, port, username and password all present.

MCP tools

Full catalog with signatures: docs/MCP_TOOLS.md.

The default catalog profile is compact: the seven session lifecycle tools stay visible, and every other tool is reached through two gateways — brain_find_tool to discover, brain_call_tool to invoke. Set BRAIN_MCP_PROFILE=native to expose every tool directly.

Sessions

The user controls every session boundary: start, resume, end and abandon are explicit commands, never inferred by a hook, an agent or a client. Sessions capture the durable artifacts they produced into an exclusive ledger, and closing is fail-closed: captured knowledge or an explicit "nothing to capture" reason, never silence.

After 24 hours without a heartbeat, an open session exposes is_stale=true; the marker is derived, the persistent status stays open, and only the 7-day server-side sweep ever abandons a session without an explicit user command.

The full lifecycle contract (capture rules, focus semantics, briefing) lives in docs/MCP_TOOLS.md; the contract is v4 and still evolving.

Configuration (.env)

# Required
POSTGRES_URL=postgresql+asyncpg://brain:REPLACE_WITH_PASSWORD@localhost:5433/brain

# Optional — semantic search and reranking
EMBEDDING_SERVICE_URL=http://localhost:8003
EMBEDDING_DIMENSION=1536
RERANKER_URL=http://localhost:8003

# Optional — relationship graph (safe defaults for a fresh environment)
GRAPH_ENABLED=false
GRAPH_LEDGER_WRITE_ENABLED=false

# Tool catalog profile
BRAIN_MCP_PROFILE=compact   # compact (default) or native

LOG_LEVEL=INFO

Never place MCP_HTTP_TOKEN or MCP_HTTP_DREAM_TOKENS in the shared .env: bearer tokens live in a private 0600 file (~/.config/brain-v42/mcp-token.env), and the graph projector credential in its own (~/.config/brain-v42/graph-projector.env). Full reference — every variable, the private secret files, preflights and rollout gates: docs/OPERATIONS.md.

Network trust model

The deployment targets personal agents on a trusted LAN. MCP, PostgreSQL and Neo4j bind to loopback; metrics and automation default to loopback.

Embedding topology: production/default = local unified endpoint http://localhost:8003; deploy/dev-pc is a superseded rollback/reference path.

The reranker shares the unified embedding endpoint :8003/rerank. Treat :8003 as LAN-exposed until you have proved the live bind yourself, and never expose it — or the MCP port — to the Internet. Repository code alone does not prove a live firewall state.

Dream mode

Nightly agent pipeline (scripts/dream.sh: scan → clean → connect → synth → promote → reorg) plus server-side ticket-extraction, roadmap-curation and session-sweep jobs. Every mutating phase sits behind a killswitch and every killswitch ships closed; dry-run is the shipped default. Each phase runs under an exact MCP tool allowlist. Details: docs/ARCHITECTURE.md and docs/OPERATIONS.md.

Production state

The repository migration target is migration 045. No page in this repository proves a live schema head — measure it, do not read it here:

docker exec brain_v42_postgres psql -U brain -d brain -Atc "select version_num from alembic_version;"

The running build names itself: GET /health returns version (the installed distribution) and alembic_head (the revision shipped with it), both measured, never written by hand.

Development

pytest tests/unit -v                          # no PostgreSQL required
pytest --cov=brain_v42 --cov-report=term-missing
ruff check src/ tests/ && ruff format --check src/ tests/
mypy src/

• Stack: Python 3.12+, FastMCP 3.x, SQLAlchemy 2.0 async + asyncpg, Alembic, Pydantic 2, structlog.

• TDD is mandatory — red, green, refactor; tests are never edited to make code pass.

• Coverage floor: 60% (CI blocks below).

• The dev toolchain is pinned exactly (pip install -e ".[dev]") so local always matches CI.

Project layout

brain-v42/
├── src/brain_v42/
│   ├── config.py              # pydantic-settings — single config surface
│   ├── db/                    # SQLAlchemy engine + tables
│   ├── models/                # Pydantic models
│   ├── repositories/          # CRUD + FTS + pgvector + graph adapters
│   ├── services/              # business logic, embedding, reranker, dream, dedup
│   ├── metrics/               # sidecar + collector + cockpit endpoint
│   ├── automation/            # independent webhook/dedup runtime (:9201)
│   └── mcp/                   # FastMCP server + brain_*/dream_* tool handlers
├── tests/{unit,integration}
├── alembic/versions/          # migrations (shipped inside the wheel)
├── scripts/                   # operational CLIs (dream.sh, canaries, repair)
├── services/                  # GPU embedding service + shim + supervisor
├── deploy/                    # systemd units, per-host compose, install.sh
└── docs/                      # ARCHITECTURE, SCHEMA, MCP_TOOLS, OPERATIONS, runbooks

The top-level module graph is enforced acyclic in CI (scripts/check_module_layering.py): any module can still be extracted into a standalone service without dragging a cycle with it.

CI/CD

Stages: lint → test → security → build. Security gates: pip-audit, bandit, gitleaks, container-image pin checks. Docker images are built and pushed on main; there is no deploy stage — rollout to a host is always a manual, out-of-band step. Releases are tag-driven: the release rail builds the wheel + sdist, proves the wheel ships its migrations, and attaches both to the GitHub release.

Versioning

• The shipped version is 0.2.0, and it stays 0.x on purpose: a 1.0.0 would promise a stable interface and a way back, and this project has neither yet.

• No lossless downgrade is promised, at any version. Two migrations refuse their own downgrade: 037 raises a SQL EXCEPTION as soon as a session capture would be lost, and 039 raises unless the operator passes an explicit -x opt-in.

• Rolling a schema back is therefore an operator procedure with a runbook, never a version guarantee — restore from a snapshot instead.

License

Source code: Apache-2.0.

Model weights are not covered by that license, and this is not a formality. The production embedding model, Qodo/Qodo-Embed-1-1.5B, is published under QodoAI-Open-RAIL-M — a license carrying use-based restrictions, not a permissive one. No weights are stored in or distributed by this repository: every model is downloaded from its upstream host at build time, by the operator, who accepts each model's terms directly from its publisher. See NOTICE before redistributing anything.