How Your Brain Works Guide for ToolRouter

A plain-English guide to ToolRouter's knowledge brain — the part of the platform that remembers things for you so your tools get smarter over time.

---

The big idea

Your brain is a personal memory box that lives alongside your tools. You (and your team) fill it with facts, preferences, and things you've learned. Then, whenever you use a tool, the brain quietly whispers the right context into the tool's ear so the output feels like yours — not generic.

The more you use ToolRouter, the more your brain grows, and the less you have to repeat yourself.

---

The building blocks

Wings, rooms, and halls

Pages get sorted into a three-level hierarchy, like folders inside folders:
Wing — the big area (e.g. design, engineering, family)
Room — the sub-area (e.g. brand, infra, holidays)
Hall — the type of knowledge: fact, event, discovery, preference, or advice

A page about your brand colours might live in design / brand / fact. This structure makes searching faster and more focused.

Tiers (how important a page is)

Every page sits in one of four tiers:

Tier	Meaning
L0	Always-loaded identity stuff (your name, your job). Shown no matter what you search for.
L1	Things you read a lot. Promoted automatically when you use them often.
L2	Normal topic knowledge. The default for most pages.
L3	Old one-off facts that rarely matter anymore. Fades into the background.

Higher-tier pages are easier to find and weigh more in search results.

---

When you use a tool

1. Consultation — the brain whispers to the tool

Before the tool runs, the platform searches your brain for anything related to what you're about to do.
If you ask a tool to "make a video for our brand," it finds your saved brand colours, tone, and style pages.
Those relevant pages get passed to the tool as context — along with a tool-specific instruction like *"compare this to the user's known brand guidelines."*
The tool uses your actual info instead of guessing. That's why the output feels like yours.

2. Ingestion — the tool teaches the brain

After the tool finishes, its result is sent back to the brain.
A small AI reads the output and decides: *Is this worth remembering?*
Trivial results (errors, "done!" messages, binary files) are skipped.
Real knowledge gets written as a new page with a title, summary, and proper wing/room/hall tag.
It all happens fire-and-forget — you never wait for it.

3. Drawers — the raw source text

For certain tool outputs, the full verbatim text is stored behind the page in a "drawer."
Drawers only exist when two gates are both true:

The tool has opted in (drawerEligible: true in its manifest)
You've turned on the drawers_enabled setting

API keys, passwords, and secrets are redacted automatically before the drawer is saved.
You can open a drawer later with brain_expand if the summary isn't detailed enough.

---

Every night, your brain sleeps

At 3 AM in your local timezone, your brain runs a nightly maintenance cycle — like tidying your room while you're away. It has three phases:

Phase 1 — Consolidation

An AI reviews all your recent pages and looks for patterns. When it spots a theme across several pages, it writes a new synthesis page. For example:

*"These five pages all describe a minimalist eco-brand targeting UK professionals — here's a single insight summarising that."*

This keeps your brain from becoming a pile of disconnected facts.

Phase 2 — Connections

The sleep cycle finds pages that reference the same thing and links them together. Future searches can then follow those links to surface related knowledge automatically.

Phase 3 — Pruning

Archives pages you haven't touched in a long time.
Merges near-duplicates.
Promotes pages you use frequently to higher tiers.

Your brain wakes up tidier, with fresh insights and cleaner organisation.

---

What you can do manually

These tools are available to you directly as MCP tools:

Tool	What it does
`brain_query`	Search the brain. Supports filters for wing, hall, and scope.
`brain_add`	Jot down a new fact by hand.
`brain_update`	Edit an existing page. Also moves pages between personal and team scope.
`brain_delete`	Remove a page.
`brain_status`	Check how many pages you have, see recent activity and sleep stats.
`brain_wings`	See the areas your brain is organised into.
`brain_lint`	Run a health check for orphan or stale pages.
`brain_expand`	Open a drawer to see the raw source text.
`brain_settings`	Toggle drawers, change sleep timezone.
`brain_admin`	Admin-only operations (lint, promote, rebuild index, team_sleep).

---

Privacy and safety

Secrets are scrubbed. The redaction pipeline runs twice — once before the classifier LLM sees the raw tool output, and once on the summary it writes before storage. API keys, tokens, and passwords are stripped at both gates.
Personal vs team scope. Your personal brain is just yours. Team pages are visible to team members only. The platform never mixes them.
You can wipe everything. Delete a single page, or purge your whole brain via a GDPR-safe sweep that cascades to drawers and sleep-generated summaries.
Temporal validity. Old versions of a page don't vanish — they're marked superseded with a timestamp, so you can ask *"what did I believe about X on this date?"*

---

Why this matters

Less repetition. Stop pasting the same brand brief into every prompt.
More consistency. Every tool sees the same version of your preferences.
It compounds. Each tool call is a chance to make your brain smarter, which makes the next tool call better, which makes the brain smarter again.
It thinks for you overnight. While you sleep, patterns get extracted, connections get drawn, and the cruft gets swept away.

Your brain turns ToolRouter from a pile of tools into a platform that genuinely knows you.