Define purpose, audience and scope
What you'll learn
Estimated time: 8 minutes
A Brain is a structured, shared knowledge store: individual pieces of knowledge, connected and categorised. Your AI tools read it over MCP, so every tool answers from the same source. Without a stated purpose, though, it turns into a dumping ground: everything goes in, nothing comes back out reliably. Write the charter before you touch the New Brain dialog, not after.
- Write a one-paragraph charter stating purpose, audience and boundaries.
- Set explicit inclusion and exclusion rules before the first upload.
- Decide whether a new Brain, or a section of an existing one, is the right unit.
Video lesson
The animation turns a vague "let's put our knowledge somewhere" request into a one-paragraph charter with named inclusions and exclusions.
Start with the charter, not the upload
A Brain that starts from "let's put everything in and see what happens" becomes hard to search and harder to trust. Before you create anything, write three or four sentences: what questions or decisions this Brain should answer, who reads from it, and who is allowed to write to it.
For example: "Prompt: Help me write a one-paragraph charter for a Brain that will hold our customer onboarding process. Audience is the support team; purpose is answering 'how do we handle X' consistently, without re-asking a senior colleague every time." Excerpted response: "Charter: This Brain documents Aiqbee's customer onboarding process so the support team answers 'how do we handle X' consistently. It holds step-by-step procedures, exception handling and agreed decisions about edge cases. It excludes individual customer data, pricing negotiations and anything not yet agreed as standard practice."
Turn the charter into inclusion rules
A charter states intent. Inclusion rules make it operational for whoever does the uploading next month, once you have forgotten the reasoning behind it.
- Include: agreed procedures, decisions with their reasoning, recurring exceptions and their resolution, source references.
- Exclude: personal data about identifiable customers, anything still under negotiation, one-off exceptions nobody expects to repeat.
- Boundary: where this Brain stops and a neighbouring one (a different product, a different team) starts.
- Owner: who approves new Neuron Types (the categories a Brain's content is filed under) and structural changes once the Brain is live.
One Brain, or several?
A Brain scoped to one team or one recurring purpose is easier to keep trustworthy than one shared across unrelated projects. If the knowledge genuinely belongs to a whole team rather than a single initiative, an Organisation Brain is the better fit — the next lesson covers how to set that up in the New Brain dialog.
Before you continue
The charter names a purpose, an audience and at least one exclusion.
Inclusion rules are specific enough that someone else could apply them.
You have decided whether this is one Brain or several.
