Brain — Offline-first (Tier 1)

The rig brain is baked into every agent image at build time. Agents read it from the local filesystem — no network call, no latency, no Cloudflare interference.

Why

research.rig.dashecorp.com enforces a Block-AI-Bots Cloudflare rule. Claude Code CLI's WebFetch is blocked, so agents cannot reliably fetch the brain at runtime. Baking it in at build time eliminates the dependency entirely.

How It Works

Dockerfile and Dockerfile.base use a multi-stage build:

FROM alpine AS brain-stage
RUN apk add --no-cache curl
WORKDIR /brain
RUN for f in entry repos agents surfaces flows events donts endpoints; do \
      curl -sf -A 'rig-agent-runtime/1.0' \
        "https://research.rig.dashecorp.com/brain/$f.md" -o "$f.md" || exit 1; \
    done

# ... main build stage ...
COPY --from=brain-stage /brain /app/brain
ENV RIG_BRAIN_DIR=/app/brain

The custom User-Agent (rig-agent-runtime/1.0) bypasses the Block-AI-Bots CF rule during the image build.

Brain Files

File	Contents
entry.md	Top-level entry point — start here
repos.md	Repo manifest
agents.md	Agent roles and capabilities
surfaces.md	Discord surfaces and channels
flows.md	Workflow and process flows
events.md	Event types and schemas
donts.md	Rig rules and hard prohibitions
endpoints.md	API endpoint reference

Reading the Brain

# Start with the entry point
cat $RIG_BRAIN_DIR/entry.md

# Read a specific section
cat $RIG_BRAIN_DIR/repos.md

RIG_BRAIN_DIR defaults to /app/brain. It is set as an ENV in the Dockerfile and available to all processes in the container.

Build Failure on Missing Files

If any brain file is unavailable at image build time (rig-docs down, network error, HTTP error), the build fails immediately. The || exit 1 in the for-loop and curl's -f flag both propagate failures — no image is shipped with a partial or stale brain.

This is intentional: a partial brain is worse than no brain.

Prerequisites

• rig-docs#122 — publishes the raw markdown files at https://research.rig.dashecorp.com/brain/{name}.md. This must be deployed before this image can be built.

Tier Roadmap

Tier	Mechanism	Freshness	Status
1	Baked into image at build time	Per image release	✅ This feature
2	Cluster-internal brain service	Minutes	Planned

Tier 2 will add a sidecar or init-container that pulls a fresh brain snapshot from a cluster-internal service between image releases, without requiring a WebFetch to the public internet.