Company brain · Built solo, June 2025
The brain that runs a manufacturer
I was the only person in the marketing department, fielding requests from more than fifty people across the business. Rather than work more hours, I built a system. It now runs the department, and the AI function that grew out of it is the one I lead.
The company is named because I am named: this is my job, and it is on my resume. What is removed is their material, not mine. Every partner name, staff name, price, live URL and body of client-facing copy has been replaced with a placeholder. The internal executive dashboard is not represented here at all. The architecture, the rules, the skill structure and the governance model are the parts that are mine to show, and those are intact.
Click any folder to open it, any file to see what it holds and why it exists. This is the real structure, with the contents described rather than reproduced.
Eight sections, in a fixed order. Every brain I have built since uses the same skeleton, which is what let me go from this one to the next in a day rather than a month.
Who we are
The thirty-second version. What the company does, who the audience is, and the one rule that the audience is always the hero and we are the guide.
It is first because an agent that does not know who it is writing for produces confident, well-formatted, useless output.
Load order
Constitution, then behavior rules, then hard limits. Then only what the task needs.
A silent prompt-enhancer runs before all of it, scoring the incoming request. If it is clear enough the agent restates it in one line and proceeds. If it is vague, it asks two or three multiple-choice questions built only from what is actually in the system, never invented options.
The six zones
One line each, as a table. Orientation, how to act, what to build with, what is true, drafts, and approved.
Trust order
Approved > Knowledge > Work Zone. Drafts are never a fact source. Pricing comes only from the current approved sheet. If a fact is not in an approved source it is marked UNKNOWN, never guessed.
Most knowledge systems have no answer for what happens when two files disagree. This is that answer, and it is three words long.
Routing
The token saver, and the part I am most pleased with. A table mapping request type to the exact files to open. Draft partner collateral? Read these four. Write an email? These three plus the matching template.
It is hand-built sparse retrieval. Deterministic instead of probabilistic, because the output has to be reproducible and auditable. Same request, same files, same quality, every time, and when it is wrong I can point at the line that made it wrong.
Hard rules
Never invent a price, a turnaround time or a fact. Nothing goes external without an approver. Never edit an approved file in place. Archive, never delete. Missing an asset? Placeholder it, never fabricate a substitute.
Output checklist
Run before anything is delivered. Voice, audience, the right template, house style, name check, dash check, phone-format check.
Governance
Named owners, named approvers, and the lifecycle: draft in the work zone, review, approved copy promoted, old version archived.
The guardrails, framed the way they actually work: as things the system refuses to do.
Invent a fact.No price, turnaround time, credential or claim is ever generated. If it is not in an approved source, the output says UNKNOWN and surfaces the gap.
Fabricate a missing asset.If a required logo or image is not in the reference index, a labeled placeholder goes in position. It never substitutes something that looks close.
Cite a draft as fact.Work Zone files are structurally excluded from being a source. The trust order is enforced, not suggested.
Edit an approved file in place.A new version is created and the previous one archived. Nothing in the approved library is ever destructively changed.
Publish without an approver.Named approvers, and the lifecycle is part of the constitution rather than a process document nobody reads.
Guess who it is working for.Output saves to the requester's own drafting folder. If the agent does not know who it is talking to, it asks rather than choosing.
Use a banned phrase.A short list of phrases that undersell the business. Checked on every deliverable before handover.
Ship an em dash.A house-style rule that sounds trivial and is not: it is the canary. If dashes are slipping through, nothing else in the checklist is running either.
Real source, copied out of the repository that runs. Each excerpt prints the file it came from, and any trimmed lines are marked rather than quietly spliced.
Thirteen generators, plus maintenance and quality-control skills. Every one is reference-first: it opens a known-good example from the approved library and swaps the content. None of them design from scratch, which is the entire reason output stays consistent across a thousand pieces.
welcome-flyer
New-account welcome material, generated from the approved gold standard.
Single emails and sequences, routed by audience and channel rules.
price-sheet
Pricing collateral. Gated: it can only read from the current approved sheet.
clinical-guide
Technical requirement guides for a given procedure type.
quick-start-guide
Onboarding and equipment guides for new accounts.
lab-slip
Order forms and requisition documents.
print-one-pager
One and two-pagers, promotional flyers, brochures.
partner-microsite
A full account-specific microsite from the approved template.
executive-summary
Leadership-facing summaries with the detail stripped out.
landing-page
Campaign landing and confirmation pages.
presentation
Decks, always starting from the master template rather than blank.
social-design-system
Social graphics that stay inside the brand system.
proposal
Account proposals, with pricing gated behind approval.
twin-sync
Keeps every markdown file and its rendered HTML twin from drifting apart.
folder-cleanup
Maintenance pass that finds orphans, stale references and misfiled work.
site-update
The end-to-end loop for updating a live account page and rehosting its documents.
prompt-enhancer
Runs first and silently on every request. Scores it, then either proceeds or asks.
Three agents, each scoped to a job that recurs often enough to be worth encoding but is too involved for a single generator.
Account brief
Assembles everything known about an account into one brief: the facts, the current collateral, the history, and what is missing. What used to be a slow manual sweep through folders before a call.
Onboarding
Walks a new account through setup, generating the material each step needs as it goes rather than sending a pack up front and hoping.
Proposal
Drafts a full proposal from the account facts, with pricing gated: the agent assembles everything except the number, which stays a human decision.
The brand system the generators build against. Real structure, neutral values: the actual palette belongs to the company, so these are stand-ins that demonstrate the rules rather than reproduce the identity.
Every change is logged with its reason. A change is not done until the system agrees with it.
2026-07-14Technical education library added
A new knowledge area for component compatibility and procedure education, with a data card describing the dataset so agents read the summary rather than the raw file.
2026-07-10Post-cleanup restructure
Added an about file to every reviewed account folder naming the current team and files. Rebuilt the pricing index. Introduced a product-lines index. Retired a catch-all category that had become a dumping ground.
The rule that came out of it: if a category is defined by what it is not, it will fill with everything.
2026-06-12Skill system merged
Consolidated two parallel skill sets into one library on the reference-first pattern. Work done with a colleague on my team, under the architecture I had set.
2026-02Rebrand forced a full rebuild
I led a company-wide brand overhaul, which meant the entire system had to be rebuilt to match. Every setup fine-tuned and re-tested.
The lesson, and it changed how I build: a knowledge system is coupled to the brand it encodes. Changing the brand means rebuilding the system, which is the argument for keeping every brand value in exactly one place. Every system I have built since does that.
2025-06First commit
Started solo. One marketer, more than fifty requesters, and no realistic path to doing it by hand.
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Next
The same architecture, three more times
This was the first. What is interesting is not that it worked, but what changed in the three systems that followed it.
The layer under it
How every one of them runs.
The operating loop, the guardrails, the agent roster and the rest of the machinery, in one place.