What's New in Cornelius v07.26

Released 2026-07-23 · Cornelius versions are named for their month (vMM.YY)

Corneliusis the open-source second-brain agent built for Trinity — a company or personal brain that compounds, with receipts. This is a Cornelius release, not a Trinity one. New here? Start at Cornelius.

v07.26 gives the brain a reference layer— mutable, freshness-stamped records of the people, organizations, and products your thinking is about — with a guarded boundary that keeps records from ever becoming endorsed insight. Indexing gets incremental, and the autonomous loops get the evidence discipline learned from months of running unattended.

What changed

•Animated architecture explainer — the full pipeline from capture to autonomous operation in ~3 minutes (docs/cornelius-explainer.gif) — it plays at the top of How Cornelius Works.

•Reference scopes — a CRM layer inside the brain — manage-reference-data plus seven ref-* skills (ingest, query, audit, reconcile, refresh, supersede, bridge) maintain mutable, freshness-stamped entity records — people, organizations, products, engagements, watched competitors — in separately mountable sub-scopes under Brain/Company/. Records carry provenance: reference, temporal validity, and per-type freshness SLAs; ref-bridge surfaces which of your insights an entity is a live instance of. A guarded boundary keeps records from ever auto-promoting into endorsed insights. Conventions: resources/layered-brains/REFERENCE-SCOPE-SCHEMA.md + COMPANY-BRAIN-SCHEMA.md.

•Incremental indexing — run_index.shnow reuses the embedding of every unchanged note (content-hash matching) and splits cold rebuilds into short resumable batches; a daily refresh takes seconds instead of a 15–20 minute full re-embed.

•Tension detection v2 — structural-artifact filters (index/changelog noise, near-duplicates, same-source pairs), persistent dismissals that survive re-scans, and curated tensions that survive graph re-bootstrap.

•Hardened autonomous thinking — incubation-loop v1.22 and domain-watch v1.18 codify evidence discipline learned from months of autonomous operation: stale-wire dating, primary-source pinning, pre-registered triggers, injection-not-spawn, framework-exhaustion guards.

•Live orb freshness — the Brain Orb exporter overlays notes captured since the last reindex, so capture → refresh → appears holds without waiting for the nightly rebuild.

•57 skills — for insight capture, autonomous thinking, connection discovery, reference data, research, and content creation.

Learn more

How Cornelius works · Getting started · All skills

Source and full history: github.com/Abilityai/cornelius

All releases