v12.0.0

Brain Framework 12 ranks notes and records in one search query and answers several times faster; BF links carry only a relationship. On a personal brain of 52,000 records, full cache builds take 13 s instead of 69 s, searches and reads 0.3–0.4 s instead of up to 1.8 s, and the cache shrinks from 357 MB to 239 MB. The bf.yaml and retrieval suite formats stay at version 5, but notes that use removed link attributes or frontmatter fields need the manual upgrade below. The search cache rebuilds automatically.

Changed

• Breaking: search ranks every item containing any of the words in one BM25 query. The former all-words pass let long records that happened to contain every word fill the results before a note matching most of them; BM25 already ranks fuller matches higher.
• Only projects, concepts and each action's ACTION.md receive the note ranking boost. concepts/index.md, concepts/log.md and an action's inputs/ and outputs/ rank like evidence.
• A query shaped like an identity (re:invent, python:3.14) that no item is, names or links to ranks its words instead of returning a silent empty answer; the reply carries "identity": "unknown".
• Record field values are searchable words without their JSON keys, so a word such as author or kind no longer matches every record with that field.
• Breaking: a BF link accepts only ?rel=ROLE. The subject, evidence and asserted-by query keys and typed link attributes are removed; a link's subject is its note's entity, otherwise its file, or the collected record. Claims in relations and claims are subject, relation, target and origin: the evidence, asserted_by and attributes members are gone.
• Breaking: note frontmatter fields no longer declares relationships; it is ordinary frontmatter data.

Fixed

• Searches no longer compute an excerpt for every matching passage before ranking: only returned passages get one. A four-word query over 50,000 records took 1.9 s in excerpts alone.
• bf.yaml is parsed once per content within a command, with libyaml when available, instead of several times per search and once per indexed file during a rebuild.
• The relationship cache no longer copies an eight-column key into each of its indexes.
• Backlinks, identity searches and project review signals look up links and relationships through indexes instead of scanning every link of the brain for each relationship group.

Upgrade

1. Find removed link attributes: grep -rnoE 'bf://[^) ]*\?[^) ]*' projects concepts actions | grep -vE '\?rel=[a-z0-9-]+(#[^) ]*)?$'. Keep ?rel=ROLE; move a relationship of another entity into that entity's note, and keep supporting references as ordinary links in the same section.
2. Find frontmatter relationships: grep -rln '^fields:' projects concepts actions. Replace each identity value with a [label](bf://NAME/path?rel=FIELD) link in the note body.
3. Consumers of relations[].evidence, asserted_by or attributes read relations[].origin instead.
4. Run bf validate: remaining removed attributes are reported as invalid BF links.