Getting Started
Install
Section titled “Install”curl -fsSL https://get.brainjar.sh/brainjar/install.sh | shThe script installs a single Go binary. Update later with brainjar upgrade.
Initialize
Section titled “Initialize”brainjar initThis creates ~/.brainjar with a SQLite database, the default workspace, and a starter API key. It does not seed soul, persona, or rule content, and it does not sync anything to your agent’s config file.
To populate a fresh workspace, either author content yourself (see the concepts pages) or import a starter bundle with brainjar pack import.
Verify
Section titled “Verify”brainjar statusworkspace: <uuid>home: ~/.brainjar
effective state soul: (unset) persona: (unset) procedure: (unset) rules: (none) skills: (none)For a one-line summary suitable for shell prompts:
brainjar status --shortsoul=- persona=- procedure=- rules=0Your first switch
Section titled “Your first switch”Once you have a persona saved, activate it and push the change into your agent’s config:
brainjar persona use reviewerbrainjar syncpersona use updates workspace state. brainjar sync composes the effective prompt and writes it into the platform’s managed section (e.g. .claude/CLAUDE.md for Claude Code). If you’ve installed the SessionStart hook (brainjar hooks install), sync runs automatically when your agent starts a new session.
Run an agent without writing to disk
Section titled “Run an agent without writing to disk”brainjar shell composes a prompt in memory and spawns Claude or Codex with it as the appended system prompt. Nothing is written to CLAUDE.md, so multiple terminals with different brains do not collide.
brainjar shell --persona reviewer --task "Audit src/auth"brainjar shell --brain cto -- --model opusUse shell for one-off agent runs, scoped audits, or experiments where you don’t want to mutate workspace state.
What happened
Section titled “What happened”brainjar sync composed your active soul, persona, procedure, and rules into a single prompt, emitted resolved skills to disk, and wrote the prompt into your agent’s config file between <!-- brainjar:begin --> / <!-- brainjar:end --> markers. Everything outside the markers is yours.
Next steps
Section titled “Next steps”- Learn about the core concepts — soul, persona, rules, procedure, skill, brain
- Register brainjar as an MCP server — give your agent native access to all brainjar tools
- Migrate an existing config into composable layers
- See the full CLI reference
- Browse recipes for common workflows