Why I'm Building a Shared Brain for My AIs

I build websites, explore app ideas and share what I'm learning through ZeroWic. There is a lot I want to bring to life. AI has helped me work on things I would have struggled to tackle on my own. But as I brought more tools into the work, I found myself spending more time keeping them informed.

Imagine a team working on one problem, with each person sitting in a different room. I go into the first room and explain an idea. Someone suggests a change, so I take it into the next room. There is another question there. Back I go. Then someone else needs to know what we decided yesterday.

That was me, except the rooms were separate AI conversations. The walking was copying, pasting and asking for summaries. I had help with the work, and another job carrying the conversation around.

Meet the team

Before I go further, I should introduce the names. This is the first time I'm properly bringing this part of my work into the open.

Jess is the ChatGPT assistant I work with on posts, interviews, wording and images. Rowan helps with technical organisation and thinking through how things fit together. Chuck works on building and deploying the applications. Bruce focuses on deep research, looking for information and possible answers to the problems we face.

They are AI assistants, with roles I've developed around how we work together. They can question an idea, offer another approach and help me see something I missed. I bring my ideas and direction, take part in the discussion and make the decisions.

My dream team, you could say. Although our meeting arrangements needed a little work.

Why the Brain came into it

I didn't want to keep asking one assistant for a summary so I could explain the project to another. I wanted one shared place for the project history, knowledge, ideas and rules. Somewhere we could find what had been discussed and what I had actually agreed.

So I started building the Brain.

The simplest way I can explain it is that I wanted to bring our work into a meeting room. The notes are there. The decisions are there. The rules are there. I'm in the room too, bringing the next idea and deciding where we go.

Our shared discussion already helps me compare suggestions. One AI can raise something, another can question it, and I can look at both. Connecting that work more closely to the Brain is still being developed and tested. The meeting room describes the way I want us to work together, not a claim that every connection now runs by itself.

Why make my own?

I know there are existing tools for connecting AI systems and organising work. I haven't tested every option, and I don't need to claim mine is better to explain why I want to make it.

I want something I understand and can shape around what I actually do. I enjoy building. Working out how the Brain should remember things, how its learning process should work and how the rules can change is part of that enjoyment.

I also want fewer separate third-party apps in the middle of my work. I still use existing AI services and development tools. But wherever it makes sense, I want the organisation and workflow inside my own custom app, rather than another collection of places I need to learn and maintain.

Trust matters to me. I want to understand the tools and ready-made skills I depend on. Building this gives me a way to learn about those choices as I make them.

The words still start with me

There is something else I want to explain clearly, especially if you're reading my work for the first time.

The ideas and raw words for my posts come from me. Sometimes I write them down. Sometimes I talk through them with Jess, as I have done while explaining this project.

Jess helps with the language, the structure and making the thought understandable. We can discuss a sentence until it says what I meant. The other AIs contribute research, questions and different perspectives where they help.

That support matters to me. I want people to understand what I'm saying without losing the person behind the words.

The same applies to the app. The idea and direction are mine, but the AI team has contributed heavily to the building and problem-solving. Without that help, I wouldn't have been able to tackle it. This is work we are doing together.

What I want to make easier

Part of the Brain's purpose is to help organise my strategy and the process of preparing posts. I want less repeated explanation, less copying between conversations and more time for the work itself.

The rules matter as much as the convenience. An AI suggestion shouldn't quietly become my decision. A draft shouldn't become a published post because the system has finished writing it. I want to review, question and approve.

Having the information together gives me more freedom to organise things and move towards my goals. Sometimes seeing the work come together feels a little magical. Then something needs fixing and we're back to figuring it out. Both are part of the same project.

Ideas that never get their chance

I've met people in industry with skills, experience and good ideas who spend their days doing something different from what they would like to do. They work, follow the rules and cover their expenses. There is nothing wrong with that. Paying the bills matters.

But I keep wondering how many ideas never get a chance. An invention, a small business, something useful somebody has thought about for years. How much stays in someone's head because bringing it into the world feels too difficult alongside everything else?

I'm building the Brain for myself first. Still, I can imagine someone else using something like it to explore an idea with different AIs, keep the thinking organised and work out the next step. Their idea. Their experience. Their decisions. With some help making the work manageable.

I can imagine it being useful to a startup or a small company too, where keeping projects and information together takes time that could go into the work. That is a possibility I want to explore, not a finished service or a result I've proved.

Where I am now

The Brain is working for parts of my own process, and we're still testing it. We are finding problems, improving the structure and learning how to connect things properly. I haven't reached the end of that story.

But this is already a big step for me. I started with things I wanted to create. AI helped make more of that work possible. Bringing the information together is helping me spend more attention on those ideas.

I'll share the tools, the build steps and the problems in separate technical posts. This is where the story starts: I wanted a place where our work could stay together, so I could keep moving towards the things I want to bring to life.

Building. Not done. Never will be.