AI-Maintained Architecture Second-Brain Repository

What it is

An AI-maintained knowledge base for an enterprise architecture practice. Source material — inventory exports, meeting notes, vendor documents, research — goes into an immutable folder. An AI agent reads it, writes and cross-links governed wiki pages for applications, capabilities, decisions, standards and vendors, and keeps the whole graph consistent under a written operating contract. I curate, ask questions and direct.

The problem

Architecture knowledge lives everywhere at once: decisions in slide decks, the application inventory in the CMDB, reasoning in people's heads. Every new question starts with an afternoon of digging, and every answer goes stale the moment it is written down somewhere else.

What I built

• Three layers and a contract. Immutable evidence, an AI-owned wiki, and an operating contract that defines page types, rules and rituals.
• Resume state. A small set of files and fixed open and close rituals so work survives across sessions, days and machines.
• Two agent tiers. A strong model for schema and judgment, a cheaper model running a registry of bounded, repeatable skills.
• A skeptical reviewer. An independent pass that assumes a change is wrong until its checks prove otherwise, and never fixes its own findings.
• Validators and gates. Integrity, provenance, schema and link checks that run before anything is trusted or published.
• A two-lens capability model. Every application mapped to the business outcomes it serves and to exactly one technical class.

What came out of it

Answers that used to take an afternoon now come back in minutes, with citations to the pages they rest on. Figures live in one canonical place, so a change propagates instead of leaving stale copies behind. And the practice keeps a durable, reviewable record of why decisions were made, not just what they were.

The public starter: solvent-brain

The patterns are open source as solvent-brain, a free, MIT-licensed starter with the contract, resume state, rules and skills from this work, and no organization's data in it. Version 0.2.0 is the first tagged release.

• Use it as a template. Use this template on GitHub gives you your own copy. Put your practice's name in CLAUDE.md, drop one source into raw/, and ask the agent to ingest it.
• Or install it as a skill. In Claude Code, add the solventarchitect marketplace and install the plugin (two commands in the README). The skill scaffolds the starter into any folder without overwriting existing files, then handles the boot, ingest and close rituals. Other agents can load the same skill folder.
• What's inside. The operating contract, resume state and log, seven paste-in rules, a skeptical reviewer, a bounded operator for repeatable work, and two worked examples.
• Deliberately small. No scripts, validators or integrations. Those get built around your own systems of record; the patterns are what travel between organizations.

The write-ups below cover the patterns one at a time, and every file in the repository links to the post that explains why it exists.