Brigade documentation
Your personal AI crew, self-hosted.
Brigade is a crew of AI agents arranged on a real org chart. They delegate work to each other, switch models mid-task without losing the thread, and share one long-term memory called Tideline so what one agent learns, the rest can use. It runs entirely on your machine, under a single ~/.brigade/ directory you own. No account, no SaaS in the middle, no telemetry.
Install & first run
→Get Brigade from npm and walk through the provider/model wizard on first launch.
Quickstart
→The commands you will actually type, the in-chat commands, and the keyboard map.
How it works
→One binary, two modes: the gateway holds all state; thin clients attach to it.
What Brigade is#
Brigade is one binary that can run as a long-lived gateway — the process that holds all state and runs agents — or as a thin client that attaches to it. Start it and you get a fast chat TUI. Keep going and you unlock isolated agents with their own workspaces and credentials, persistent memory, a skill system, a cron scheduler, sub-agent fan-out, an org hierarchy, messaging channels like WhatsApp, 1,000+ app connectors, and an MCP memory server.
It is single-operator by design: one owner, a whole crew. The agents coordinate through a real org chart, all on hardware and storage you control. The same crew runs on a Raspberry Pi or a server.
The shape of it#
Clients are thin: the TUI, brigade connect, and the channel adapters are all WebSocket clients of the gateway. State lives only in the gateway, so you can disconnect, walk away, and reconnect later while your agents keep running.
┌──────────────────────── ~/.brigade/ ────────────────────────┐ │ config · per-agent workspaces · sessions · memory · cron │ └───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ ▲ │ reads/writes (filesystem OR Convex) ┌─────────────────┴─────────────────┐ brigade tui ─ws─▶ │ GATEWAY :7777 │ ◀─ws─ brigade connect brigade agent │ per-turn agent loop · routing │ WhatsApp ────────▶│ tools · sub-agents · supervisor │◀──────── cron jobs MCP client ─stdio─▶│ (brigade mcp → memory server) │ └────────────────────────────────────┘What you get#
A real crew
→Spawn isolated agents with their own personas, credentials, sessions, and memory; wire them into an org chart that governs who can talk to whom.
Memory that lasts
→Tideline: facts that persist across sessions with origin scoping, decay, a typed link graph, and hybrid keyword + vector recall.
Skills
→Drop a folder with a SKILL.md into your workspace and Brigade discovers it next turn. Prompt-resident, eligibility-filtered, 56 ship bundled.
Sub-agents
→Delegate to child agents in series or parallel fan-out, depth-capped with an abort cascade and a completion bridge.
Channels
→A typed channel-adapter contract with a shared inbound pipeline. WhatsApp and Telegram ship today; WhatsApp is the reference adapter.
Cron
→Schedule recurring or one-shot work — cron expressions with IANA timezones, intervals, or one-shot timestamps. Jobs survive restarts.
1,000+ connectors
→Gmail, Slack, GitHub, Notion, Calendar, Linear and more through the built-in Composio tool, with managed OAuth.
Bring any model
→Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, OpenRouter, Groq, Cerebras, xAI, DeepSeek, Mistral, local Ollama, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Switch mid-conversation.
Yours, and safe
→Privileged tools wait for your approval. Keys live locally at mode 0600. Everything is under ~/.brigade/ — delete it and Brigade is gone.
Autonomous loops
→Drive an agent toward a goal under hard budget, no-progress, and repetition guards — stopping only when independent checks pass.
Quality & reliability
→A deterministic anti-slop gate, a tool-loop detector, error classification with retries, and cross-model fallback keep runs honest.
Self-improvement
→Behavior changes are human-gated and reversible: propose from telemetry, gate on eval, approve, apply, revert.
60-second start#
Install, set up, and you are talking to your crew:
# install — handles Node for you (or: npm i -g @spinabot/brigade)$ curl -fsSL https://brigade.spinabot.com/install.sh | sh $ brigade onboard # storage, provider + key, model, web search$ brigade gateway run # headless, always-on$ brigade tui # chat with your crewTwo ways to read these docs
Where to go next#
Installation
→Requirements, install, and the first-launch onboarding wizard.
How it works
→The gateway, the agent loop, routing, and how Brigade stays up.
Memory (Tideline)
→The long-term memory engine: write-gate, recall, decay, and the link graph.
CLI reference
→Every command, grouped by area, with flags.