Second Brain Starter

Everything from the Build Your Second Brain workshop — AI Summit Barcelona 2026.

A second brain is a folder of markdown files and an agent that can read it. No database, no app, nothing to migrate out of later. What follows is the folder scaffold and the skills built during the session.

Fastest way to use this

You do not need to clone anything, and you do not need to copy and paste these files by hand. Open your second-brain folder in Cursor and tell the agent:

Install the daily-routine skill from github.com/MaximeGaudin/second-brain-starter

It will fetch the file and write it to .cursor/skills/daily-routine/SKILL.md. Same line for any other skill — swap the name. Two of them ship more than a SKILL.md, so let the agent copy the whole folder: to-pdf carries a template.typ, and dynamic-presentation carries reference.md and examples.md.

To get everything at once:

Install every skill from github.com/MaximeGaudin/second-brain-starter into .cursor/skills/,
and put tone-of-voice.md in me/

Start here

bootstrap-prompt.md takes you from an empty folder to a working second brain: the folder structure, a README with the rules, an interview that writes your first files, and two sample notes so you have something to ask questions about immediately.

Paste it into the agent in an empty folder and answer the five questions it asks you. It is the only thing in this repo you should run before anything else.

The skills

Build them in this order. Each one assumes the one before it exists.

They call each other rather than growing into one enormous prompt: build-a-document never formats anything itself — it hands finished markdown to to-pdf or to dynamic-presentation, and morning-brief does no triage of its own, it just reads daily-routine’s report out loud. That indirection is the whole model. It is also why you can replace the renderer without touching the writing.