Skip to content
BoB — Big ol' Brain

BoB — Big ol' Brain

TL;DR. “BoB” (Big ol’ Brain) is the name for this entire global Claude Code tooling framework — everything in BOB_SOURCE (skills, agents, commands, hooks, scripts, PM), deployed to ~/.claude/ (BOB_HOME).

Identity

Section titled “Identity”

BoB (Big ol’ Brain) is the name for this global Claude Code tooling framework. Everything in the BoB source repo (BOB_SOURCE) — skills, agents, commands, hooks, templates, scripts, and project management — is BoB. It is deployed to ~/.claude/ (BOB_HOME) where Claude Code reads it at runtime.

When someone says “Bob”, “BoB”, “big brain”, or “big ol’ brain”, they mean this framework and all projects linked to it.

What BoB Is

Section titled “What BoB Is”
  • The source repo (BOB_SOURCE, default ~/projects/bigbrain) and its deployed runtime (BOB_HOME, ~/.claude/)
  • The symlink architecture that distributes tooling to projects
  • The CLI tools: cdi, cdb, cdp, cdl, cdprov
  • The conventions, quality gates, and workflows enforced by hooks
  • The institutional memory stored in GitHub Issues (decisions, lessons, session summaries)

What BoB Is Not

Section titled “What BoB Is Not”
  • BoB is not Claude itself — BoB is the framework Claude operates within
  • BoB is not any single project — BoB serves all linked projects equally
  • BoB is not a cloud service — everything runs locally

Aliases

Section titled “Aliases”

All of these refer to the same thing:

Alias Usage
Bob Casual reference (“Bob, set up a new project”)
BoB Stylized abbreviation (“BoB framework”)
big brain Informal (“let big brain handle it”)
big ol’ brain Full name, rarely used

Natural Language Examples

Section titled “Natural Language Examples”
  • “Bob, set up a new project” → run cdi to initialize with global tooling
  • “Is Bob up to date?” → check git status of BOB_SOURCE and symlink health via cdb
  • “What does Bob have for code review?” → describe the code-reviewer agent and code-expert skill
  • “Bob needs a new skill” → create a directory in BOB_SOURCE/skills/, then deploy
  • “Push this to Bob” → promote a local item to global via cdp

Architecture Summary

Section titled “Architecture Summary”

BoB is a source repo (BOB_SOURCE) deployed to a runtime directory (BOB_HOME, ~/.claude/) and symlinked into each project’s .claude/. The full source→runtime model — directory tree, component types, and what syncs how — is documented once in the handbook → The Big Picture.

Cross-Machine Pattern

Section titled “Cross-Machine Pattern”

BoB is portable because the source repo is a git repo:

  1. Clone the source repo to ~/projects/bigbrain
  2. Set BOB_SOURCE and BOB_HOME env vars in ~/.zshrc
  3. Deploy to ~/.claude/ via scripts/deploy.sh
  4. Install dependencies (jq, Node.js 18+) and CLI aliases (scripts/bob-install.sh)
  5. Clone project repos and run cdi in each to create symlinks
  6. Create CLAUDE.local.md for any machine-specific overrides (gitignored)

See docs/new-machine-setup.md for the full guide.