Prompt Kit

Open Brain: Companion Prompts

Your Open Brain is built. Now make it work for you. These five prompts cover the full lifecycle: migrate your existing AI memories into the system, bring over your existing second brain, discover how it fits your specific workflow, build the daily capture habit, and run a weekly review that surfaces patterns you'd never catch on your own.

Note If you hit a wall during setup, you're not on your own. We built a FAQ that covers the most common questions and gotchas people run into. And if you need real-time help, we created dedicated AI assistants that know this system inside and out, one for each major platform: a Claude Skill, a ChatGPT Custom GPT, and a Gemini GEM. They can walk you through any step, troubleshoot connection issues, and answer questions specific to your setup. Use whichever one matches the AI tool you already use.

What's included:

  • Prompt 1: Memory Migration — Frontload your Open Brain by extracting everything your AI already knows about you
  • Prompt 2: Second Brain Migration — Bring your existing notes from Notion, Obsidian, or any other system into your Open Brain without starting over
  • Prompt 3: Open Brain Spark — Personalized use case discovery based on your actual work and habits
  • Prompt 4: Quick Capture Templates — Five capture patterns optimized for clean metadata extraction
  • Prompt 5: The Weekly Review — End-of-week synthesis that surfaces themes, forgotten action items, and emerging patterns

Tools: All prompts work with any MCP-connected AI (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok). Prompt 1 specifically requires an AI that has accumulated memory about you. Prompts 2 and 5 require your Open Brain MCP server to be connected.

Prompt 1: Memory Migration

Job: Extracts everything your AI already knows about you and saves it to your Open Brain, so every other AI you connect starts with that foundation instead of zero.

When to use: Right after you finish the Open Brain setup guide. Run this once per AI platform that has memory about you (Claude, ChatGPT, etc.).

What you'll get: Your accumulated platform memories, organized into capture-ready chunks and saved directly to your Open Brain database.

Output feeds into: N/A — one-time setup. Everything saved becomes searchable by all your AI tools immediately.

What the AI will ask you:

  1. Confirmation that your Open Brain MCP server is connected
  2. Permission to pull up everything it remembers about you
  3. Approval before saving each batch to your brain

Prompt 2: Second Brain Migration

Job: Migrates your existing second brain — Notion databases, Obsidian vaults, Apple Notes, text files, n8n captures, or anything else — into your Open Brain so you don't lose what you've already built.

When to use: After setup, if you built a second brain using last month's guide or any other system. Works with any format you can export or paste.

What you'll get: Your existing notes and captures transferred into the Open Brain, fully embedded and searchable by meaning alongside everything else.

Output feeds into: N/A — one-time migration. All migrated content becomes immediately searchable through semantic search from any connected AI.

What the AI will ask you:

  1. What system you're migrating from
  2. How to get your data out (export instructions specific to your platform)
  3. Approval before saving each batch

Prompt 3: Open Brain Spark

Job: Interviews you about your actual work, tools, habits, and pain points, then generates a personalized list of Open Brain use cases you wouldn't have thought of on your own.

When to use: After setup, when you're staring at the Slack channel wondering "what do I type?" Also useful to re-run every few months as your workflow evolves.

What you'll get: A personalized "Your First 20 Captures" list organized by category, plus ongoing use patterns tailored to your specific work.

Output feeds into: N/A — standalone discovery tool.

What the AI will ask you:

  1. What tools you use daily (especially which ones don't talk to each other)
  2. What kind of decisions you make repeatedly
  3. What information you find yourself re-explaining to AI
  4. What you forget that costs you time
  5. Who you work with regularly

Prompt 4: Quick Capture Templates

Job: Five copy-paste sentence starters optimized for clean metadata extraction. Each one is designed to trigger the right classification in your Open Brain's processing pipeline.

When to use: Keep these handy as a reference. After a week of capturing, you won't need them — you'll develop your own natural patterns. But they're useful for building the habit early.

What you'll get: Five starter patterns with explanations of why each one works.

Why does formatting matter? Your Open Brain's edge function uses an LLM to extract metadata from each capture — people, topics, action items, type. These templates are structured to give that LLM clear signals, which means better tagging, better search, better retrieval.

Output feeds into: N/A — reference tool.

What the AI will ask you: Nothing — this is a reference you keep.

These are not prompts to paste into AI. These are templates for what you type into your Open Brain capture channel or say directly to any MCP-connected AI using "save this" or "remember this."

1. Decision Capture

Decision: [what was decided]. Context: [why]. Owner: [who].

Example: Decision: Moving the launch to March 15. Context: QA found three blockers in the payment flow. Owner: Rachel.

Why it works: "Decision" triggers the task type. Naming an owner triggers people extraction. The context gives the embedding meaningful content to match against later.

2. Person Note

[Name] — [what happened or what you learned about them].

Example: Marcus — mentioned he's overwhelmed since the reorg. Wants to move to the platform team. His wife just had a baby.

Why it works: Leading with a name triggers person_note classification and people extraction. Everything after the dash becomes searchable context about that person.

3. Insight Capture

Insight: [the thing you realized]. Triggered by: [what made you think of it].

Example: Insight: Our onboarding flow assumes users already understand permissions. Triggered by: watching a new hire struggle for 20 minutes with role setup.

Why it works: "Insight" triggers idea type. Including the trigger gives the embedding richer semantic content and helps you remember the original context months later.

4. Meeting Debrief

Meeting with [who] about [topic]. Key points: [the important stuff]. Action items: [what happens next].

Example: Meeting with design team about the dashboard redesign. Key points: they want to cut three panels, keep the revenue chart, add a trend line. Action items: I send them the API spec by Thursday, they send revised mocks by Monday.

Why it works: Hits multiple extraction targets at once — people, topics, action items, dates. Dense captures like this are the highest-value entries in your brain.

5. The AI Save

Saving from [AI tool]: [the key takeaway or output worth keeping].

Example: Saving from Claude: Framework for evaluating vendor proposals — score on integration effort (40%), maintenance burden (30%), and switching cost (30%). Weight integration highest because that's where every past vendor has surprised us.

Why it works: "Saving from [tool]" creates a natural reference classification. The content itself becomes searchable across every AI you use. This is how you stop losing good AI output to chat history graveyards.

Prompt 5: The Weekly Review

Job: End-of-week synthesis across everything you captured. Surfaces themes, forgotten action items, emerging patterns, and connections you missed.

When to use: Friday afternoon or Sunday evening. Takes 5 minutes. Becomes more valuable every week as your brain grows.

What you'll get: A structured review of your week's captures with pattern analysis, overdue action items, and suggested focus areas.

Output feeds into: N/A — standalone weekly ritual.

What the AI will ask you:

  1. Confirmation that your Open Brain MCP is connected
  2. Optionally, what you're focused on right now (to weight the analysis)

Why These Prompts Exist

Your Open Brain is infrastructure. These prompts are the habits that make it compound. The Memory Migration gets you off the ground with context you've already built. The Second Brain Migration brings over everything you've captured in other systems so you don't start from zero. The Spark shows you where your brain fits into YOUR life, not someone else's. The templates build the daily habit. The weekly review closes the loop. Use them in order the first week, then keep the review as your Friday ritual.

Built by Nate B. Jones — companion to "Your Second Brain Is Closed. Your AI Can't Use It. Here's the Fix."