type	meta

Second Brain Template

An Obsidian-compatible second brain for software engineers. Designed for use with Cursor's AI assistant to automatically track work, projects, people, and tasks.

Getting Started

1. Clone this repo and open it as an Obsidian vault.
2. Open in Cursor and the .cursor/rules/brain.mdc rule will activate automatically.
3. Start telling the assistant about your work — it will file journal entries, detect tasks, and track people.

Structure

brain/
├── journal/
│   ├── daily/        # YYYY-MM-DD.md — raw daily entries
│   ├── weekly/       # YYYY-WNN.md — weekly rollups
│   ├── monthly/      # YYYY-MM.md — monthly rollups
│   └── yearly/       # YYYY.md — yearly rollups
├── tasks/            # Individual task files with status tracking
├── projects/         # One folder per project with overview.md
├── people/           # Notes about individuals
├── reports/          # Investigation reports
└── templates/        # Templates for new entries

Conventions

• Format: YAML frontmatter + Markdown body, [[wiki-links]], #tags
• Daily notes: YYYY-MM-DD.md — the primary input layer. New information goes here first.
• Weekly notes: YYYY-WNN.md — synthesized from dailies.
• Monthly notes: YYYY-MM.md — synthesized from weeklies.
• Yearly notes: YYYY.md — synthesized from monthlies.
• Tasks: tasks/<descriptive-name>.md with status frontmatter (todo, in-progress, done, blocked).
• Projects: projects/<name>/overview.md with goals, status, architecture, and links to tasks/journal entries.
• People: people/<name>.md with role, team, and relationship metadata.
• Reports: reports/YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>.md for investigation findings.

AI Skills

The .cursor/skills/ directory includes four skills:

• brain-sync — Say "sync my brain" to run gap detection, journal rollups, task audits, and project discovery.
• brain-recap — Say "recap my week" (or day/month/year) for a summary of journal entries.
• brain-investigate — Say "investigate X" for a structured multi-source research workflow.
• brain-todos — Say "show my todos" to see your current task board.

Customization

Edit .cursor/rules/brain.mdc to tailor the assistant's behavior to your role and workflow. The rule controls how journal entries are filed, tasks are detected, and people are tracked.

Obsidian Plugins

• Dataview (community plugin) — powers the people directory view.
• Bases (core plugin) — provides the task board and project index views via .base files.