Maintain is the closing pillar, and it is the one that decides whether your brain is still useful in two years. A brain that is not maintained slowly accumulates broken links, stale notes, and forgotten skills, and one day you open Obsidian and the graph looks like a museum of things you no longer believe. The good news is that maintenance is not a project. It is a small set of habits that fit inside a normal week. Weekly: ask your chat to run the brain pipeline against any new material you dropped in raw/, run the linter to catch broken links, and add a sentence or two of new context to about-me if anything important happened. The whole thing takes ten minutes. Monthly: open Obsidian, click on the graph view, scroll around. Look at which corners are growing and which are wilting. There is real satisfaction in seeing the graph thickening over months. It is the visible compounding of your own thinking. You are not maintaining the brain to satisfy a rule. You are maintaining it because the result of the maintenance is something you actually enjoy looking at. Two more habits that pay off. Keep the brain lean. The brain is your index, not your archive. When a project ends, move the originals to cloud storage and let the brain keep the summary. When a skill has not fired in three months, archive it. Bloat is the enemy of usefulness, because a brain full of dead matter is harder to query well. And keep your own backup. Your brain lives on LAN servers, so it is stored durably without you doing anything, but keeping a personal copy is smart and takes one click. From your dashboard, download your complete brain as a zip. Do it monthly, or after any big change, and drop the file wherever you keep your important files. That download is also your exit door: cancel any time and the brain is still yours. The whole maintenance loop is one weekly habit and one monthly habit. Once you set it up, it runs itself.
Steps
Weekly: ingest new material
Open your AI chat, ask it to ingest whatever is new in raw/, and let the pipeline write to the wiki. This is the same action as the first ingest, just smaller because you are only processing one weeks worth of additions. It takes a few minutes. You do not need to memorise commands, the chat coaches you.
Weekly: run the linter
Ask the chat to run the brain linter. The linter catches broken wikilinks (links pointing to files that no longer exist), files that are unusually short, and pages that have not been touched in a while. The output is a small report. Skim it, fix the obvious things, leave the rest for next week.
Weekly: enrich the about-me
Did something change about you this week? A new project started, a person became important, a problem became urgent. Add a sentence to about-me. This single page is the highest-leverage maintenance you can do, because every future conversation uses it as the first context.
Monthly: walk the graph in Obsidian
Open Obsidian, click on the graph view, and just look. Notice which clusters are growing. Notice which ones look stale. Click on a node at the edge of the graph and follow its links inward. The walk is short, maybe ten minutes, and it is satisfying to do. Watching the brain thicken month over month is one of the quiet pleasures of using the system.
Monthly: prune the bloat
After the graph walk, ask the chat to surface skills you have not used in three months and pages that have not been edited in six. Archive what is no longer relevant. Move source originals (PDFs, exports) out of raw and into your cloud storage once they have been summarised. The brain is the index, not the archive.
Monthly: download a backup
Your brain lives on LAN servers, so it is already stored durably. Keeping your own copy is still smart and takes one click: open your dashboard and click Download (.zip). You get the complete brain, including raw source files, in a single archive. Monthly is a good rhythm, and do it after any big change too. Drop the file wherever you keep important documents.
Resources
Troubleshooting
- I skipped a few weeks and the brain feels heavy.
- Run the linter, do a graph walk, archive the obvious dead weight. The brain forgives a missed week. Two missed weeks is still recoverable. Six months without maintenance is a real cleanup but still doable.
- The graph view does not look like it is growing.
- Are you actually adding to raw? Maintenance only compounds if there is new material. If nothing is going in, nothing comes out.
- I have not downloaded a backup in a while.
- Your brain is safe on LAN servers either way, but grab a fresh zip now from your dashboard. Do not wait for the perfect moment. Then put a recurring monthly calendar reminder so you always have a recent personal copy.
- I have an old skill that I am not sure I still need.
- If you have not used it in three months, archive it. You can always restore it from git history if you change your mind.