A second brain for your AI is a folder of files that your assistant reads before it answers: your strategy, your customer profile, your brand voice, your offer. Setting it up is quick. The hard part comes a few weeks later, when nobody maintains the folder any more.
What happened
In early November 2026, Ben van Sprundel of the Ben AI community listed eighteen tips for such a second brain. He says he gathered them from hundreds of support conversations and setups for his customers. The core of it:
Half an hour is enough to start. According to Ben, you get about 80 percent of the value from a thirty-minute brain dump: five to ten files on your strategy, your ideal customer, your brand voice and your offer. That percentage is his estimate, not a measurement.
One local folder, with one instruction file. That file tells the AI where everything is. Ben calls it AGENTS.md. He prefers a local folder to Notion or Google Drive, because Claude reads the files directly instead of through a connector, which he says is faster, more accurate and cheaper. He gives no figures for this.
Most setups fail not at the start, but after a few weeks. Without daily updates and a clean-up every week or two, the folder quickly goes out of date.
Keep the folder structure fixed. The names matter little, but every change forces the AI to work out again where everything is.
In a team: one owner and one business rule. Ben advises setting who has access per folder, or even per file. He also recommends a rule in the instruction file that asks what is good for the company, so that everyone's AI does not simply go along with whoever asks the question.
The post is also an offer: Ben sells a guide and three skills that set up, maintain and clean up the folder for you.
What this changes for you
The most useful insight is the least spectacular: a second brain is not a project that gets finished, it is maintenance. So whoever sets one up is mainly deciding who keeps it up to date.
Appoint one owner. Not "the team", but one person who decides what goes in and what comes out.
Plan a fixed clean-up. A quarter of an hour every week or two: remove outdated notes, fix broken references, add new decisions.
Do not let updating depend on goodwill. Ben has a daily scheduled task save only the insights from meetings, CRM and chat, not the raw data. That reduces noise, but a summary can also leave something out or copy it wrongly. Check a few notes against the source now and then.
Decide up front what must stay out. Such a folder holds exactly the information you do not want out in the open: rates, customer names, strategy. Agree which tools and accounts may access it, and do not put customers' personal data in it.
We work this way ourselves. Our knowledge base has an owner for each part, a daily task that updates it and a fixed clean-up round, and that maintenance is exactly what separates a folder we use from a folder we forget.
How it works under the hood
A second brain works without an extra layer: the AI reads plain text files from your disk. The instruction file acts as fixed context at the start of every conversation and counts towards the context window, the model's working memory. The more you put in it, the faster that window fills up and the greater the chance that a relevant piece drops out. So keep the instruction file short and point from there to the rest.
Whether a local folder really works better than a connection to Notion or Google Drive depends on the size. For a small, fixed set of files it is plausible; for thousands of documents you need search through a connector. Ben provides no measurements for his claim.
This news touches chapters 10, 15 and 16 of the course AI(l) or nothing by Newway. If you follow the course, this subject returns there at a calmer pace.
What you can do with this
Want to know what this means for your business? Plan an introduction: half an hour, no sales pitch, but an honest answer to the question where to begin. Rather read on first? The course AI(l) or nothing is free and starts with the basics.
Written in response to a post by Ben van Sprundel in the Ben AI community on Circle.
