Show HN: I am getting genuine questions DocBrain, a self-hosted, read-only memory layer for humans and AI agents, captures undocumented knowledge from tickets, threads, incidents, and code changes with per-claim provenance, and its client source is open under MIT while the server remains closed under BSL 1.1. The project, which missed its original first-half-2026 server publication target, offers free production Docker images and Helm charts for self-hosting, and aims to solve the problem of organizational knowledge loss by ingesting historical systems on day one. The memory layer for humans and AI agents. Every other tool retrieves what someone remembered to write down. DocBrain captures what nobody did — from tickets, threads, incidents and code changes — cites every individual claim to its source, and says so plainly when your record has no answer. Self-hosted. Read-only. Zero data egress. Website https://docbrainapi.com • • https://docbrainapi.com/docs Docs Quickstart quickstart • The Problem the-problem • How It Works how-docbrain-works • Architecture architecture • Security security https://youtu.be/zZ7WdjmOXHU real recording, no edits — watch the full 90-second quickstart ▶ Project Status: client source open, server closed.The source for everything DocBrain runs onyourside of the network boundary — the docbrain CLI and the IDE MCP server — is in this repo under , MIT-licensed, built and tested in public CI — as is everything else in this repository. Audit exactly what runs in your environment and what leaves it. The server ships as free production Docker images BSL 1.1 permits production use with full Helm charts, complete configuration, the crates/ threat model , and all the docs to self-host in production. The server source stays closed for now — we originally targeted the first half of 2026 to publish it, we missed that date, and we won't post a new date until we're certain we can hit it. If a closed server is a dealbreaker for you, that's a rational position and we respect it: how DocBrain earns trust . Contributions: code PRs for the client crates, plus documentation, configuration, and bug reports. When the server source publishes, it will be published under the Business Source License 1.1. Every organization runs on knowledge that never gets written down: the decision from a meeting, the fix someone found at 2am, the workaround only one person knows. It lives in PRs, chat threads, tickets, and people's heads. When that person changes teams or quits, years of context walk out the door with them. Tools that "index your docs and add a chatbot" solve the wrong half of the problem: they retrieve your stale, incomplete wiki slightly faster. The knowledge that actually runs your organization was never captured in the first place. And it's getting worse now that AI produces code, changes, and fluent documentation faster than any human can absorb — your agents read those docs too. More documentation is easy. Documentation your organization can trust is the scarce thing. DocBrain captures knowledge at the source , the moment it's created: Someone merges a change ──→ decisions, caveats, procedures extracted A team works through chat ──→ the answer, distilled from the thread A deploy goes out ──→ what changed and why On-call resolves an incident ──→ the fix and the root cause Any other system you run ──→ ingested via the Connector SDK On day one it also reads backwards. Point it at systems you have been using for years — archived Slack channels, closed tickets, merged pull requests, the wiki nobody has opened since 2022 — and it ingests them in place, read-only. Your first answer can come from a thread nobody remembers writing. Nothing is migrated and nobody has to refile anything. Captured fragments are confidence-scored, connected into one memory, and composed into documentation with per-claim provenance . Drafts route through human review before anything publishes. Then DocBrain keeps the result honest: freshness tracking, contradiction detection, and staleness alerts as reality changes. Ask a question, get a cited answer — or an honest "I don't know" instead of a guess. git clone https://github.com/docbrain-ai/docbrain.git && cd docbrain ./scripts/setup.sh interactive wizard: picks provider, sets keys, starts services Or manually: cp .env.example .env set LLM PROVIDER and API keys docker compose up -d Get the auto-generated admin API key docker compose exec server cat /app/admin-bootstrap-key.txt Open the web dashboard open http://localhost:3001 Or ask a question via API curl -H "Authorization: Bearer