How Your Team Brain Works

A plain-English guide to the shared brain — the part of ToolRouter that grows smarter for your whole team as you work.

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The big idea#

Every team gets its own shared brain. It's a memory box that everyone on the team can see and search. Personal brains stay private to each person. The team brain holds the stuff the team knows together — brand guidelines, competitor research, client info, product details, whatever you've been working on as a group.

Teams and individuals use the same tools. The difference is who the result belongs to: work billed to the team grows the team brain; work billed to you personally grows your personal brain.

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The two brains, side by side#

You have a personal brain:

• Only you can see it.
• Grows when you use tools billed to your personal account.
• Pruned overnight by your own sleep cycle, on your own timezone.

Your team has a team brain:

• Everyone on the team can see it.
• Grows when anyone uses tools billed to the team.
• Pruned overnight by the team's own sleep cycle, on the team's chosen timezone.
• Changes require team admin role (add, delete, re-file).

A tool call searches both when looking for context. You never have to pick which brain to ask — it looks in the right places automatically.

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How things land in the team brain#

There are three ways.

1. Team-billed tool calls (automatic)#

If you use a tool and the bill goes to the team's account, the result lands in the team brain by default.

• You run brand-extract on a competitor while working on team billing → page goes to team brain.
• You run the same tool on your personal billing → page goes to your personal brain.

This is how the team brain compounds over time: every piece of team work automatically adds to shared knowledge. Nobody has to click "share."

Each auto-ingested page carries a source note that says which tool created it and what input you gave. So anyone on the team can see *"this came from running brand-extract on stripe.com"* without digging.

2. Manual add (deliberate)#

Anyone can directly add a page to the team brain with brain_add scope: "team". Use this for:

• Notes that weren't produced by a tool (meeting decisions, policies, reference numbers).
• Knowledge you already have that you want to share.

3. Overnight synthesis (sleep cycle)#

Every night at 3 AM in the team's timezone, the team brain tidies itself up. This is the team sleep cycle. It's like a whiteboard get-cleaned-up by a little brain-secretary while everyone's asleep.

Three things happen:

• Phase 1 — Consolidation. A small AI reads the recent team pages and spots patterns. When it sees something worth saying, it writes a fresh insight page. Example: *"Three competitors all use dark UIs with single bright accent colors — here's what that suggests for our visual direction."* These insight pages are marked as made-by-the-system so everyone knows where they came from.
• Phase 2 — Connections. The brain looks for pages that are related and links them together. Next time you search, your results can follow those links to surface more relevant knowledge.
• Phase 3 — Pruning. Old pages nobody's read in a long time get archived. Near-duplicates get merged into one. Pages you use a lot get promoted so they're faster to find.

All of this happens inside the team brain only. Personal brains are never touched by team sleep, and team sleep never reads anyone's personal brain.

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Who can do what#

The rule is simple: anyone can contribute, but only admins can rearrange. This protects the team brain from accidental damage while letting everyone help it grow.

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Fixing a mistake: moving pages between brains#

Sometimes a page ends up in the wrong brain. Maybe you were on team billing but your tool call was actually personal research. Or you added something to your personal brain that the whole team should see.

Use brain_update with the scope field:

• Team → personal (demote). Move a team page back to your personal brain. You can do this for your own pages; a team admin can do it for any team page.
• Personal → team (promote). Move a personal page into the team brain. Requires you to be a team admin when done this way.

Exception: Pages the system wrote (sleep-generated insights, consolidation summaries) can't change scope. They represent team-wide synthesis, not any one person's knowledge. If an insight page is wrong, admins delete it; the next sleep cycle makes a better one.

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Admin controls#

Team admins and owners get a single tool — brain_admin — for team-level brain management. The most important option is team_sleep:

• team_sleep + enable — turn on nightly sleep for the team, optionally with a timezone (e.g. Europe/London).
• team_sleep + disable — turn it off. The team brain still grows from auto-ingestion, it just won't get auto-consolidated.
• team_sleep + status — see when the last sleep ran, what it did (pages consolidated, insights created, edges made, pages pruned), and how much it cost.
• team_sleep + run_now — kick off a sleep cycle right now. Useful after a burst of new pages or when you want fresh insights before a meeting.

Admins also handle brain_lint for health checks and brain_delete for removing specific team pages.

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Privacy and safety#

These guarantees hold no matter what:

• Personal brains are fully private. Your teammates can never see them. The team sleep cycle never reads personal pages.
• Team brains never leak into personal brains (and vice versa) except through the explicit scope-change action you asked for.
• Secrets are scrubbed. Any API key, token, or password pattern in a tool's raw output gets redacted before it's stored — in the summary, in the input note, and in the raw drawer. Redaction runs twice: before the classifier sees the text, and before the final page is written.
• Auto-ingestion has clear audit trails. Every system-created team page records which tool ran, what the input was, and when. Admins can trace any page back to its origin.
• Leaving a team removes access. If you leave, the team brain disappears from your view. Your personal brain is yours and travels with you.
• The team can be wiped. Admins can delete any page. Users can purge their own personal brain with a GDPR-clean sweep that cascades to drawers and summaries.

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What makes this useful#

The team brain compounds three times over:

1. Every team-billed tool call adds new knowledge automatically. You don't have to "file" it.
2. The overnight sleep cycle turns scattered pages into connected insights and keeps the brain tidy.
3. Shared context flows into every future tool call. A new teammate runs a brand-aware tool for the first time — and it already knows your voice, your colours, your competitors, because the team taught it.

After a few weeks, the team brain becomes the best summary of what the team knows — better than a wiki nobody updates, better than slack history nobody searches. Because the tools have to use it, it stays accurate and fresh.

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Quick reference#

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The TL;DR#

• Team billing = team brain. That's the main rule.
• Everyone contributes; admins steer. Adding is easy; editing is gated.
• The brain gets smarter every night through its own sleep cycle.
• Privacy is protected by design — personal brains and team brains never mix unless you explicitly ask them to.
• Mistakes are fixable. Wrong scope? One call to fix it.

Use your tools. The team brain takes care of itself.