A brain is a living thing. It can be healthy or it can be quietly rotting. The difference between a brain that helps you in year three and one nobody trusts by month six is a small set of routine checks.
The shift to make first: you do not run these checks by hand. The AI does. It reads the brain, finds the problems, and either fixes them or hands you a short list. Your job is to review and decide, not to grind through pages. Everything below is written that way.
Weekly: ask the AI to run a health check
Once a week, open your AI chat with the brain connected and ask it to check the brain's health. A simple prompt is enough:
Run a health check on this brain. Report orphan pages, broken wikilinks, missing frontmatter, and anything in
raw/older than 30 days. Then tell me the three most important things to fix.
The AI reads the structure and hands back a short, prioritised list. It will look something like:
- 3 orphan pages in
wiki/concepts/with no incoming wikilinks - 1 broken wikilink:
wiki/projects/q3-launch.mdpoints to[[jane-d]], which does not exist - 7 pages missing frontmatter (acceptable, just FYI)
- 2 files in
raw/from more than 30 days ago
You do not have to fix any of it by hand. Ask the AI to do the fixes it is sure about ("fix the broken wikilinks and add aliases where you find duplicates") and to leave anything ambiguous for you. Broken wikilinks come first: a broken link is a thought you wanted to connect to something that is not there. Either the target page gets created or the link gets removed. Orphan pages in a cluster usually mean a topic that should be wired into the rest of the brain; ask the AI to add the links. Missing frontmatter is a soft warning. Files lingering in raw/ are sources nobody ingested, or originals nobody moved out after ingest.
Monthly: refresh from your sources
Connected drives keep changing after the brain is built. Files get edited, decisions land, processes drift. The source-sweep skill is how the brain stays current: it re-walks the source folders the brain was mapped from (Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, through your own connectors), finds what changed since the last sweep, and updates the pages that cite those sources, with a change reason that says what changed and why. It does not re-ingest everything and it does not copy documents in; the brain stays an index over the mother files.
Run a source sweep on the [department] folders. Show me what changed and update the affected pages.
Then review. Every page keeps its History, so you can see exactly what the sweep rewrote and undo anything you disagree with. The AI does the walking and the writing. You decide what stands.
Monthly: look at the shape of the graph
Numbers miss things the eye catches. Once a month, open the graph view in your dashboard and just look at the whole shape. Healthy brains form connected clusters; trouble shows up as islands.
You can also let the AI walk it for you. Ask it to use walk_graph and surface the problems:
Walk the graph and tell me: orphan pages with no links, clusters that should connect but do not, and corners nobody has touched in months.
For each, decide: add the missing links, or archive the corner that is genuinely dormant. The AI proposes, you approve.
Quarterly: review your skills
Every three months, review the skills the brain is running. Ask the AI to list them:
List the skills in this brain, what each one does, and whether it is active.
list_skills returns them with their status. Turn off or remove skills you no longer trust or use. Be deliberate about adding third-party skills: a skill tells the AI what to do, so a poorly written or hostile one can do real damage. Read a new skill in full before you set it active, and when a skill is updated, read what changed before you keep it. A short list of trusted, active skills beats a long list of forgotten ones.
Power follows the person, not the check
A skill runs inside the session of whoever invokes it, so it can only ever see and touch what that person is allowed to see and touch. The same health check run by an owner covers the whole brain; run by a member, it covers just that member's departments. You do not need separate checks per role. The scope is set automatically by who is asking.
What each signal means
| Signal | Meaning | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Broken wikilink | A thought you wanted to connect went nowhere | Ask the AI to create the target or remove the link |
| Cluster of orphans | A topic disconnected from the rest of the brain | Ask the AI to add 2-3 wikilinks per page |
Files stuck in raw/ | Material collected but never ingested | Ingest, or move to long-term storage |
| Many duplicate entities | Aliases are not being caught | Ask the AI to add aliases and re-link mentions |
| Sources drifting stale | Connected folders changed, pages did not | Run source-sweep for that area |
| No activity in 30 days | A source stopped feeding the brain | Check your integrations in Settings, reconnect any that dropped |
When in doubt, ask the AI
Most health questions have a two-prompt answer. Try:
Run a full health check on this brain. Identify the three most important things I should fix this week, and fix the ones you are confident about.
The AI looks at the structure, runs the relevant checks, prioritises, and does the safe fixes. Trust the prioritisation. Handle the top item, leave the rest until next week.