Show HN: OzBrain, a shared brain for knowledge between agents and your team
I think agent-first chat interfaces will be a primary software modality and busy dashboard/UI will go away. I’m not sure who exactly wins it, but I want my knowledge to grow/go with me. A lot of the “knowledge” ie research, analysis, reasoning will be done by agents as the primary user. Our current notes tools & tasks management systems were built for humans… I don’t care what the 17th thing on my bug backlog is. I want to conduct agents that can execute for me and do great work. What I built OzBrain to do: + Create a central place for agent reasoned knowledge to live + Be agnostic about what apps/agents connect to it + Capture everything and track it so I can audit it + Enable teams, collaborators or partners to share brains + Handle conflicts so many agents in the same article doesn’t blow up + Refactor knowledge into more token friendly chunks and map the index well + Close the knowledge loop so new thinking supersedes old thinking across the corpus. Don’t erase, depreciate and link + Keep user data safe and secure ++ Be easy enough to use that you don’t have to have any technical knowledge Some among us will always build their own custom solutions, but there are millions of tech professionals and small business owners that will use agents heavily and need a solution. So I’m trying to build that. Isn’t this like gBrain? Yes, similar. I think it’s like AWS vs Vercel. AWS is very powerful, configurable, and useful if you’re technical and want to invest the time into really fine tuning your system… but if you just want your web deploy/hosting to just work and be easy to deal with you use Vercel. // WHY I MADE IT I’ve been enjoying getting back to my technical roots, as I lost my coding skills more than a decade ago, but with AI I can focus on the system and the product in partnership with agent coding workflows. I recently built a Voice AI for older people. To build it I created an agentic engineering workflow (feel free to rip that up as I’m always looking to improve systems: https://ozbrain.com/resources/eng-flow ) My approach with coding agents is trust but verify, and I’m trying to replace the parts where a human would review with an adversarial or specialized agent who would give a better answer/review. I have workflows that will go high level task to shipped PR running in Claude cloud sessions. I use Claude Code locally and Cursor when I want a tighter loop on doing visual work like UI or layout. And Codex to either load balance usage for TokenThriffting or when I want a different llm to think thru something. It was a pain in the ass passing .md files around and keep track of which version was the most recent, so I built a hosted .md storage right in Supabase and any of my agents already have Supabase access. This let me build a solid, scalable, secure voice AI from my phone at the gym. All my agents have access to our knowledge, can write to it, update and refer to it as we build and improve the product and the systems we use. Out of 75 founder friends I asked about how they manage shared knowledge, 26 built their own custom knowledge systems… Obsidian vaults with 7k files synced through a VPS, markdown repos behind their own MCP servers, cron jobs stitching Supabase to a skills file… each a different Frankenstein they have to maintain. 32 said they felt the pain of moving static files around but didn’t have any solution for it. So I rebuilt my brain better and used it to build it. // HOW YOU CAN HELP Would love to have you try it out. The maintenance loop is still in alpha so not running it on customer data yet. If you built your own brain I’d love to hear how you did it. What criteria was most important for you in its design & function. If you are tired of shuffling .md files around I’d love to have you try out OzBrain and to give feedback, just ask your agent to put it in the shared bugs & features brain! Cheers! Bubs.co
Discussion Highlights (13 comments)
travisueki
So is this cloud sync for my Md files? Who pays for the diffing and versioning?
bbor
Almost all of this is stuff I have indeed "frankenstein[ed]" for myself, so consider this comment a +1 on market fit, there! That also gives me a reason to pause, tho; the pitch in general is as solid as it can be on a site with markdown turned off (why, lord, why), but as a format minutiae megafan, I was left a little dissapointed. Where do you/OzBrain stand on Markdown formats? Could I use Sphinx with this, in rST and/or native MyST? Can it generate plain PDFs, fancy PDFs, or even animated static sites? etc. etc. etc. Not trying to gotcha, just curious to hear your thoughts & dreams on the topic! It seems like some subculture(s) of SWE/SV/YC/AI has landed on obsidian-ish markdown with lots of wikilinks as the presumed default, which makes sense. So I'm assuming it's the same here. But also, your 'OzBrain vs. Obsidian' page does describe one difference as 'Markdown export anytime' vs. 'Markdown on disk' -- presumably that's just a hedge about hosting paradigm rather than a comment on the persistent format? P.S. You're likely aware but there's at least one other company using Oz -- Warp's coding agent. Have you considered renaming this to something unimpeachable like DeepReasoningBrain? ;) P.P.S. Holy hell your `eng-flow` thing is incredible. Maybe I'm behind the times, but... I mean, has anyone else processed how close we are to Minority Report and Iron Man ?! P.P.P.S. Is any part of that/this OS?
gosolozero
I’m not sure I get the value over Obsidian, can you explain the static file issue? Only happens at 7K+ individual files? What happens if you always conjoin files?
gavinboston
Do you have a solution for degradation in accuracy when compiling larger amounts of llm-produced text? I am also building LLM knowledge/memory systems and I've been surprised how bad LLMs are, even SOTA models, at summarizing non-trivial input batches of text. They get things wrong, distort the underlying meaning or data, etc.
cyrusradfar
This is a fascinating place in the stack to sit. I need to dig in a lot more. Nice start. Good luck with the showing!
indigodaddy
This is interesting. Would you consider this a different type product/benefit than all the "memory" things we have seen popping up everywhere?. Is it different just because it lives in the cloud? To me it feels like a different thing than memory.
rendonroman
It’s very encouraging to see serious attempts at addressing continuity between agents’ outputs. Right now, everyone seems to be figuring out their own way of maintaining consistency across sessions without endlessly over-contextualizing each new one. This feels like an important layer of the emerging agent stack, and I think this Show HN will be useful to a lot of people working through exactly that problem.
ggangsir
I have been thinking about this idea for a while. Cool work.
sinuhe69
I think the central question for a such memory system is whether we or the agents can find the relevant information and how to organize these data as changes continues to come in. Would we miss something in the retrieval process? How do we organize the information so they stay actual and correct without piling up the garbage? Of course we can continue to concatenate the data and tag them with version and date, but then we have to face the problem of extracting the relevant information in a short time. If we delegate that problem to a LLM, long context retrieval performance will degrade and the cost will explode. That is the reason why we condense the information in the first place. Forgetting + Synthesizing are the necessary parts of learning and basically with memory + smart retrieval we want to build a learning system.
rgbrgb
nice :) > love to hear how you did it this is ours we built for Hedgy https://setoku.com our approach was to build a data lake that sucks company data into clickhouse and staple that to a knowledge store. this way the brain has a stream of live facts and builds knowledge around it. we gave up on trying to make the knowledge store human-readable -- i totally think there could be something there, but for now we just care about enhancing the agent you're using. it makes my claude code very good at debugging and gives everyone a way to vibecode dashboards and small internal tools with real data. i also run a personal instance for my wife and I that sucks in monarch money and gmail. mostly use it to chat through big money moves.
chrisrickard
much needed, will give it a crack - congrats on shipping!
tidbeck
I have been looking for something like this but would actually want to self host due to the potential value/privacy of the data.
Sammi
I have a folder called reports, plans, and code-reviews in each repo. I put my md files for agents there, and voila they're in the cloud along with my source code in git. I just talk to my local agent about these files and it finds things using grep and whatever. Done. No mcp or special server needed. I've been pitched products like ozbrain before, but I've failed to see the need over what I already have. Seems like more complication for no gain to me. Am I missing something?