Brain Weekly Review Skill

The Brain weekly review skill is a free Claude skill that looks back at seven days of notes in your Brain vault and writes one short review. Claude checks which notes changed, collects the open action items, flags projects that stalled and proposes a top 3 for next week. You read it, adjust it, and Claude saves it as a new note.

What is in a review from the Brain weekly review skill?

Five short sections, with links to the notes they come from:

• Wins: what got finished or decided this week.
• What changed: the notes that were created, edited or moved.
• Open action items: unchecked tasks across the notes you touched, with overdue ones on top.
• Stalled: projects without a change in the last two weeks.
• Top 3 for next week: a proposal, for you to keep or replace.

The links point to notes inside your vault, so the review works as a jumping-off point on Monday morning.

How does the Brain weekly review skill know what changed?

From the version history of your vault. With versioning enabled, every write, append, move and delete through the Brain tools becomes a git commit. brain_history shows those commits with date, short hash and a message such as “brain_write: projects/website.md”. That gives Claude an exact list of the notes that changed this week, instead of guessing from file names.

Two limits come with it. brain_history returns at most 50 recent changes per call, vault-wide or per note, without a date filter. On a very busy week, have Claude check the history of the project notes one by one. And only changes made through the Brain tools are recorded. If you edit files directly in the vault folder, those edits do not appear in the history.

Does the Brain weekly review skill work without versioning?

Not well. Without VERSIONING_ENABLED=true on your server, brain_history returns a note that version history is not enabled, and there is no change list to build the review from. Claude then has only search and the folder listing, which say what exists, not what moved this week. Turn versioning on before you rely on weekly reviews. The Brain MCP setup guide shows the variable.

Which Brain tools does the skill use?

Five tools from the Brain MCP add-on:

• brain_history lists recent changes, vault-wide or for one note.
• brain_list shows the folder structure and the folder descriptions.
• brain_read opens a note.
• brain_search finds notes by term, using the search index first and a full scan when the index has no hits.
• brain_write saves the finished review as a new note.

The skill never moves or deletes a note. It only reads, plus one write for the review itself.

When does the Brain weekly review skill write to your vault?

Only once, at the end, and only after you approve the text. Claude shows the review in the chat first. You change what you want, then say “save it”. The note follows the style your vault already uses for headings, dates and links.

Saving needs Can make changes, which is on by default for the Brain tool. If you set the Brain tool to read-only for a seat in My Account → MCP Self-hosted → Seats, the review still works and you copy the result yourself. With versioning on, the saved review is a commit too, so it is never an overwrite you cannot undo.

What do you need for the Brain weekly review skill?

MCP Self-hosted and the Brain add-on. MCP Self-hosted costs € 217,80 excl. VAT: € 180,00/yr including 3 seats, and the Brain add-on is € 72,60 excl. VAT: € 60,00 per year. The skill is a free download without a license.

The Brain add-on stores markdown files in a folder on your own server:

VAULT_PATH=/vault
VERSIONING_ENABLED=true

How do you install the Brain weekly review skill?

1. Download it here. Checkout is free, and the zip is listed under Skills in My Account.
2. Claude Code: unzip into ~/.claude/skills/, or into .claude/skills/ for one project.
3. Claude Desktop: add the zip in Claude’s skills settings.
4. On Friday afternoon or Monday morning, ask: “Do my weekly review.”

Other prompts: “What did I work on this week?”, “Which projects have not moved in two weeks?” or “Collect my open action items from this week’s notes.”

Who uses a weekly review of their notes?

Freelancers, consultants and team leads who keep their work in a Brain vault and want a fixed moment to look back. The Brain weekly review skill takes the busywork out of that moment: finding what changed and which tasks are still open.

The Brain weekly review skill is free. Download it here, see the other skills in the Claude skills catalog, or read the free Claude skills overview.