Steps
- Record every meeting (Granola) and discuss work in channels, not DMs; the automated feeds do the rest.
- CC hermes@ryevalley.co on any email thread the brain should remember.
- Say decisions out loud with the word “decided”, with owner and date on commitments.
- Before interrupting a human with a recall question, ask the brain via Hermes in Slack and read the cited page.
- Before inventing a process, check playbooks/. After doing something twice, tell Hermes to draft the playbook.
- See a stale or wrong page: fix it or tell Hermes to. Corrections are the highest-signal contribution.
How to feed the brain good context and how to pull value back out. This page is part of the standard brain setup (Hockey Stick installs a version of this at every client). Audience: everyone at the company, human or agent.
The one rule
If it would matter in 3 months, it goes in the brain. If you are not sure where, put it
in inbox/ with a date. Captured-and-messy always beats perfectly-organized-and-missing.
Feeding it: best practices
- Let the automated feeds do the heavy lifting. Meetings (Granola), Slack, and email are captured automatically every day. You do not need to file what you already said in a recorded meeting or a public channel. The single highest-value habit is simply: record every meeting, and discuss work in channels rather than DMs, because DMs and unrecorded calls are invisible to the brain.
- CC hermes@ryevalley.co on any email thread the brain should remember. This is the email capture ritual and it works from any email domain. A CC is a deliberate capture request: the thread gets distilled into the brain that night, no judgment call needed. Use it for client threads, deals, partner conversations, anything with a commitment or decision in it.
- Say decisions out loud, with the word “decided.” The distillers judge what to capture. Make their job trivial: “Decided: we’re moving Megaphone to its own Stripe account in August” in a channel is a guaranteed clean capture. Decisions made silently, or buried in a thread as “yeah let’s just do that I guess,” are where institutional memory dies.
- State commitments with owners and dates. “Blake will send the proposal by Friday” captures perfectly. “We should probably send that at some point” does not.
- Correct the brain when it is wrong. If a page says something stale or false, fix it (edit and commit) or tell Hermes to. A brain people silently distrust is dead within a month. Corrections are the highest-signal contribution there is.
- Do not paste secrets. Credentials, API keys, and personal data do not belong in the brain. Financial and compensation detail goes in the owner tier only; when in doubt, flag it for Michael/Hermes to file rather than filing it yourself.
- One fact, one home. Check whether a page already exists before creating a new one (entities/, people/, playbooks/). Update in place; git history is the archive. Never create “-v2” or “-final” files.
Using it: best practices
- Ask before you interrupt. Before pinging a teammate or Michael with “what did we decide about X” or “what’s the state of client Y,” ask the brain (via Hermes in Slack). It has every meeting, decision, and captured signal since Jul 2026, and it answers with file references. Interrupt humans for judgment, not for recall.
- Trust but verify by reference. Answers cite files (e.g. Megaphone gets its own dedicated Stripe account (August 2026)). For anything consequential, read the cited page. If an answer has no citation, treat it as unverified.
- Start work by reading the relevant pages. Onboarding to a client: read its clients/ page and recent meetings mentioning it. Picking up a project: read the decision pages that shaped it. Five minutes of reading routinely replaces a half-day of asking around.
- Playbooks are the how-to library. Before inventing a process (onboarding a client, launching a campaign, setting up an entity), check playbooks/. After doing something for the second time, ask whether it should BECOME a playbook, and tell Hermes to draft one from what you did.
- The monthly state-of-the-business page (State of the Business: September 2026) is the fastest complete picture of the company. Read it monthly; point new hires and contractors at it first (it is team-tier by design).
- What you cannot see. The owner tier (Owner tier: payroll, detailed financials) is Michael-only, and query surfaces enforce that automatically. If an answer seems to have a gap there, that is intentional, not a malfunction.
For agents specifically
Load the ryevalley-brain skill before reading or writing. Follow its conventions exactly: tier rules, commit format, em dash sweep, idempotency checks. Read the brain before doing work in a domain; write durable results back after. An agent that does work without writing back is a contractor; an agent that writes back is compounding.
Anti-patterns (the ways brains die)
- Capture theater: filing everything, including noise. Volume is not value; the distillers exist precisely to say no.
- The side channel: real decisions happening in DMs and unrecorded calls while the brain captures the ceremonial ones.
- The stale page nobody fixes: one wrong entity page teaches everyone to distrust all of them. Fix or flag, always.
- The private fork: keeping your own notes doc with better information than the brain. If your doc is better, its contents belong in the brain.