MihaiBuilds/the-brain

The Brain

The workflow runtime for the MihaiBuilds ecosystem. Self-hosted Postgres-backed scheduler, four trigger types (manual, cron, webhook, file), and four step types (shell, LLM, Memory Vault REST, MCP).

Every workflow you write today drifts into a one-off script tomorrow. Cron lines on a server you forgot. A bash file glued to a Python script glued to a webhook handler. State scattered across .env files, log files, and the database the script happens to know about. Repeatability is a checkbox; observability is tail -f.

The Brain is the runtime underneath. You define a workflow as a Python file with named steps. The Brain runs it — on demand, on a cron schedule, on an HTTP webhook, or on a filesystem change — and persists every run to Postgres so you can inspect what happened. Steps can shell out, call a local LLM, query Memory Vault, or invoke any MCP server. The Brain is a workflow orchestrator, not an AI agent — it doesn't make autonomous decisions, it runs the workflow you authored with full visibility into each step.

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Status

v1.0 — released 2026-06-15. First stable release of The Brain. Stable workflow runner, CLI, HTTP API with bearer auth, scheduler + watcher daemons with cron/webhook/file triggers, MCP tool integration, structured logging, and a redacting diagnostic bundler.

Release notes: GitHub Releases. Build-in-public story: the mihaibuilds.com blog series.

Semver from here forward — the public surface (CLI commands, workflow file format, step types, trigger contracts, DB schema) is stable. Breaking changes only on a major version bump.

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Quick Start (Docker)

This walks the runner end to end: inst