Session Report — AI Dev Brain, animated

Summary

The session started from a screenshot and one question: how to read the AI Dev Brain in Obsidian, and whether it could be animated — files lighting up "like synapses", nodes firing as directories branch out and files get created and modified. The answer we built is a small, self-contained Gource harness, tools/gource/brain.sh, that auto-discovers every git repo under the root (the workspace, wiki, remotion-video, tools/*, …) and fuses them into a single tree, replaying their combined git history as a glowing neural net — dendrite-like directories, pulsing file-nodes, bloom lighting on a near-black background. At last run it fused 4 repos → 644 commit-events (the 500k-file vendored repos/ mirror and work/ worktrees are pruned before descending, and empty repos with no history are skipped). The tool has an interactive watch mode, a headless render mode (→ out/brain.mp4, 1080p/60fps), a windowless logs mode for cheap re-runs/monitoring, and a SAFE=1 render that hides file/dir/user names for shareable output.

Scope note. Several Claude sessions are running against this same working tree today (see wiki/live.md). This session's work is the Gource brain animation. The many uncommitted git status changes (backlog, ADR 0003, the Vibe-to-Prod and questionnaire-SaaS tickets) belong to those other concurrent sessions and are shown below only for transparency — they are not this session's output.

Timeline

1. User shared a screenshot of the ai-dev-brain view in Obsidian and asked how to read it — and whether the file activity could be animated "like synapses / nodes" as files are processed and modified.
2. Chose Gource (git-history visualizer) as the closest off-the-shelf match to the "firing neural net" mental model, over hand-rolling a d3/Obsidian-graph animation.
3. Stood up a portable Gource for Windows under tools/gource/ (binary + DLLs from the release zip) and authored brain.sh as the driver.
4. Made brain.sh emit a Gource --output-custom-log per repo, prefix every path with /workspace or /wiki so both trees share one root, then merge + time-sort into out/combined.log (394 events).
5. Tuned the "brain" aesthetic: bloom, dark background, --file-idle-time 0 so nodes never fade (the brain accumulates), directory highlighting, file-type legend.
6. Rendered the headless pipe (Gource → ffmpeg, libx264) to out/brain.mp4; added a .gitignore to keep the ~20 MB binary and the renders out of the repo.

Artifacts produced

All caught by the mtime scan, not git status: the repo root's .gitignore uses a fail-closed /* allowlist, so this entire directory is invisible to git. The mtime scan is the only reliable source for these.

Files edited

None by this session. The brain harness only creates new (gitignored) files — it touches no tracked files. The modified/untracked entries below come from git status on a shared working tree and are attributable to other concurrent sessions today (Higgsfield referral, Vibe-to-Prod, questionnaire-SaaS validation). Listed for transparency, not claimed as this session's work.

Key decisions

• Gource over a hand-built d3/Obsidian-graph animation — it already renders git history as physics-driven, glowing file-nodes with directory dendrites; closest fit to the "synapses firing" idea with the least new code. (substantiated by brain.sh)
• Fuse two repos into one brain — emit a custom log per repo, prefix each path with /workspace or /wiki, then merge + time-sort so both histories play as a single organism rather than two graphs. (brain.sh L29–43)
• --file-idle-time 0 — nodes never disappear — the brain accumulates structure over time instead of decaying, which reads as growth. (brain.sh L57)
• Gitignore the binary + renders — the ~20 MB portable Gource and the mp4/logs stay out of the repo; a .gitignore documents re-downloading the binary. (tools/gource/.gitignore)
• Windows path hygiene — cygpath -m to hand Windows paths to the native .exe while keeping MSYS paths for shell tools; split repo specs on the last colon so the C: drive-letter colon survives. (brain.sh L22, L34)

Tasks

adb was available this run, but this session created or moved no tickets. The Gource harness is a local tool, not tracked ticket work.

On the invocation argument. This report was launched with a TASK-00002 · "Wire PMF survey capture" · P2 · ai-property-insights · in progress 120h (past 72h threshold) nudge. That is a stale-ticket status-line alert, not what this session worked on — TASK-00002 was not touched here. It remains stale >72h and worth triaging in a dedicated session.

For reference, the board at report time showed 3 IN_PROGRESS (TASK-00002, 00005, 00010), 2 BLOCKED (00011, 00017), 12 BACKLOG, 9 DONE.

Sources & caveats

Fact sources used this run: git status/diff mtime scan (480 min) adb task status session transcript gstack timeline (stale — last entry 2 days ago, not this session).

This session's artifacts live under a fail-closed-allowlist path (tools/gource/), so git status cannot see them — the file list above is derived from the mtime scan, cross-checked against the transcript and the files on disk, not from memory. The working tree is shared with several concurrent sessions, so the Files edited list is explicitly attributed to those other sessions.

Recap reflects available context + git facts; a long/compacted session may omit earlier steps. File lists are derived from git + the mtime scan, not memory.