Aike Hillbrands, co-founder and CTO of Kombo, walks Tobi through how his team replaced ad-hoc Notion AI usage with a "company brain" — a GitHub repo of markdown files, CLI connectors, and Cursor cloud agents wired into Slack. It took two hours to build and changed how the whole company operates.
The conversation goes deep on why files and grep outperform RAG and MCP tools for agent reliability, the architecture behind Kombo's per-customer context files, and Simon Willison's "lethal trifecta" — the security risk of combining private data, untrusted content, and external write access in one agent.
They also cover the buy-vs-build debate for internal AI tooling and why Aike doesn't think enterprise HR integrations will be commoditized by AI anytime soon, despite Kombo's own business being built on exactly that promise. Aike open-sourced the template repo behind Kombo's company brain so other teams can replicate the setup: github.com/kombohq/company-brain