Brain and dashboard

Understand how Palim builds topics from session summaries and how to manage them in the dashboard.

What the Brain stores

When Brain distillation is enabled on the server, Palim processes the already stored summary of a new or updated session. The complete message transcript is not evaluated again for this step. A topic contains:

dated decisions
open items
a dated session log with the title and a short summary excerpt

The session project is preferred as the topic. If no project is present, Palim uses the first key_topic; if that is missing as well, the entry goes to Inbox. Entries are normalized, deduplicated, and capped to keep each topic compact.

Not a semantic knowledge graph

The Brain is an editable, thematic distillation of stored session summaries. It is not an embedding index or an automatically verified knowledge graph.

Catch up existing sessions

Sessions saved before the Brain was introduced may not appear automatically. Use Catch up existing sessions in the dashboard or ask an agent to call palim_backfill_brain.

The catch-up scans up to 1,000 existing sessions, uses only sessions with a summary, and deduplicates content that was already processed. It can therefore be run again without intentionally duplicating identical entries.

Manage the Brain

In the dashboard, you can:

open and search topics
create a topic manually
edit its title, hook, and Markdown content
merge two topics
permanently delete a topic
export the Brain as an Obsidian-compatible Markdown vault

Agents can perform the same core operations through palim_get_brain, palim_update_brain_topic, palim_backfill_brain, and palim_export_brain. During a merge, the target topic receives the deduplicated entries and the source topic is then deleted.

Dashboard areas

Area	Current behavior
Overview	Shows totals, recent activity, and recently saved sessions.
Brain	Read, create, edit, merge, delete, catch up, and export topics.
Memories	Create, filter, edit, and permanently delete memories.
Timeline	Read and permanently delete sessions. Session content is not editable there.
Connect	Shows the MCP endpoint and API-key configuration for additional clients.

Timeline deletion is permanent

The dashboard always uses permanent deletion for sessions. It removes the session, messages, and summary. This differs from palim_delete_session without hard_delete, which only sets the status to deleted.

Automatic consolidation of large topics

Topics have fixed size and entry limits. When a topic grows beyond them, Palim trims older entries and marks it for consolidation. If an Anthropic API key is configured on the server, Palim may send the decrypted topic content to Claude Haiku to merge duplicates and remove resolved open items. Without a configured Anthropic API key, this external consolidation step does not run.