Decision
Layer Obsidian on top of the existing brain vault as the human read lens, and stand up a private read-only website of the team tier at brain.ryevalley.co. Git remains the only sync backbone and plain markdown remains canon. Apps are lenses over the substrate; substrate decisions never depend on a lens.
Components:
- Property schema (entity, type, date, status, owner, attendees) backfilled across the full team-tier corpus by script, full corpus not sampled. Templates added under _templates/ so new notes are born schema-valid.
- Bases dashboards (.base YAML files under _bases/, versioned in git): home.md front door plus one hub page per entity with live views of that entity’s decisions, meetings, playbooks, and clients.
- Committed .obsidian baseline config: reading view default, restricted mode with three vetted community plugins (Omnisearch, Homepage, Git), wikilinks setting OFF, standard markdown links (agent renames files outside Obsidian; wikilinks rot silently).
- Team read surface: Quartz static site built by CI from RyeValley/brain, deployed to Cloudflare Pages behind Cloudflare Access with a per-person company email allowlist. Website only for the team; Obsidian app on Michael’s MacBook with auto-pull.
- Obsidian CLI and Local REST API on the Mini: approved, install when useful rather than up front.
Ruled out
- Obsidian Sync on the vault: splits truth from git (.git never syncs), no read-only mode, per-device exclusion misconfig could leak content, official warnings against mixing sync systems.
- iCloud or Google Drive on the vault: documented corruption risk, would also corrupt the git repo itself.
- Relay real-time collaboration plugin: pays for live co-editing the team does not do.
- Obsidian Publish as primary: shared password only, no per-person revocation, does not render Bases yet. Acceptable fallback if Quartz maintenance ever outweighs benefits.
- Dataview: community plugin in maintenance mode. Bases (core plugin) is the standard.
Client productization note
Rye Valley is the test case for the Company Brain install’s lens menu: base install (vault + feeds + agent + private site) always included; Notion window (locked mirror databases inside the client’s existing Notion, nightly sync, attention queue) as the headline add-on for Notion-native teams, priced in the connection slot of the rate card; Obsidian package (vault ships Obsidian-ready with config, hubs, and dashboards) as a small add-on for technical founders. Lens choice differs by client; the substrate never does. Module menu to be ratified into the offer canon as its own decision.
Consequences
- Owner tier stays a separate nested repo, never enters the team vault, the site build, or any lens. The site builds from RyeValley/brain, which has never contained Owner tier in its history, so the owner tier cannot leak by construction.
- Capture feeds (Granola meetings filer, email and Slack distillers) get schema-aware prompt updates so new notes carry properties going forward.
- Notion HQ keeps the curated front door and the team write surfaces (Initiatives, Attention Queue); the brain site is the full reference corpus. Review overlap after 60 days of real usage before slimming any Notion mirrors.
- Weekly QA audit extends to lens hygiene: notes missing entity, stale playbook updated fields, orphan pages, inbox aging.
- Acceptance test: 10 real questions answerable by a teammate on the site in under 60 seconds each, without asking Michael or Hermes.