The Workflow
The session → recall → beads loop — the second-brain pillar at work across conversations.
This is Pillar 2 — Your Second Brain — actually running. The skills and hooks all exist to serve one loop. Understanding the loop is the fastest way to understand braynee in practice.
The loop
session → recall → beads → session
Every session is tracked into the vault, the next session recalls it, and beads carries the work across the gap. The Engine runs all of it — nothing depends on you remembering to.
1. Session start
When a Claude Code session begins, braynee's
SessionStart hooks fire: Obsidian is launched if
needed, a session note is found or created under
2. Areas/Sessions/<Project>/, the git branch is detected, recent transcript
context is injected, and the ready/in-progress
beads queue is surfaced.
This is the second brain feeding you the right slice: Claude opens the session already knowing what you were doing and what's outstanding.
2. Work, mirrored
As you work, PostToolUse hooks keep the three-way
task mirror consistent — every bd create / claim / close is reflected
into Claude Code's live todo list and into the
vault task view (Tasks + Dataview). Decisions
and progress are appended to the session note as they happen, so the record
is built incrementally, not reconstructed from memory at the end.
3. Recall
Starting fresh — or after a compaction — you don't re-explain anything. The
/braynee:recall skill loads prior context: temporal
queries scan session files by date, topic queries hit
QMD search with query expansion. Every recall ends with
"One Thing" — the single highest-leverage next action.
4. Session end
SessionEnd hooks export the transcript to the vault, close out the session note, and re-index so the work you just did is immediately searchable by the next session's recall.
Why beads, specifically
Conversations get compacted. Context windows fill. A plain todo list dies with the conversation. beads is Dolt-backed and external to the conversation, so an issue created in one session is still there — with its dependencies and notes intact — three sessions later. That persistence is what closes the loop and makes the vault genuine long-term memory rather than per-conversation scratch.