Brain Kit is a recipe that replicates (creates) the project brain itself in your project folder. It is a single instruction file, recipe.md, that you hand to an AI coding agent. The agent then builds a "project brain" inside your repository - a small tree of plain markdown folders where agents keep everything they need to run your project well: what it is, how to work on it, what the current plan is, and what has already been done. It works with any AI coding agent, and the agents build it, use it, and keep it tidy on their own.
AI agents: if you were asked to adopt or adapt this workflow into a project, follow nothing else but
recipe.md- it is the complete instruction set.
AI coding agents start every session with a blank memory. The brain is what a fresh session reads to pick up exactly where the previous one stopped - and it bakes in good habits: start small while planning for growth, measure progress in milestones instead of dates, split work so agent teams run in parallel, verify each other's work before merging, and talk to you in plain human language.
architecture/
├── 00-index.md # tiny table of contents - every folder has one
├── owner/ # you ↔ AI: your todo list, step-by-step guides written for you
├── business/ # what the project does, and how the code makes it happen
├── guides/ # how to work here: conventions, testing, deploys, planning method
├── skills/ # expert know-how for the agents, grouped by domain
├── plans/ # dated plans, split into milestones with task ledgers
├── memory/ # dated history of what has been done and decided
└── sources/ # research and reference material
AGENTS.md # the front door that points agents into the brain
CLAUDE.md # small pointer to AGENTS.md
Recommended: first create a single .md file in your project (any name, e.g. idea.md) explaining in as much detail as possible the idea you want to build. Or, for an existing project, what it is and what it does, so the agent will mine it while building the brain.
Paste this into your AI coding agent, in a session at your project root:
Read idea.md, then adapt the following AI workflow to this project: https://github.com/reves/brain-kit/
Note: For an existing project, the agent studies your code first and then asks you one batch of questions - answer once, and it builds the rest; any existing docs it replaces are first moved into an archive/ folder, so nothing is lost. For a new project, it asks a few starter questions instead.