What is Brief
Brief is product context infrastructure for AI coding agents. Learn how Brief connects Cursor, Claude, and Copilot to your product strategy, decisions, and customer insights.
Brief provides the business intelligence layer—the "why are we building this?"—that keeps AI coding agents aligned with strategic objectives.
The Problem
When you use AI coding agents like Cursor, Claude, or Windsurf, they're brilliant at how to build things but have no idea what you should build or why. They don't know your customers, can't remember decisions you made last week, and have no visibility into your roadmap or strategic priorities.
Brief solves this by automatically understanding your product context from tools you already use (Linear, Notion, GitHub, meeting transcripts, analytics) and making it available to AI agents. It's the product brain that coding agents are missing.
Who Brief is For
Brief is built for founders and product-focused engineers at early-stage startups (typically 2-15 people, with a sweet spot around late-seed companies).
You're a great fit if you:
- Use AI coding tools heavily (Cursor, Claude, Windsurf)
- Feel the pain of context-blind AI tools
- Waste time re-explaining context in every AI conversation
- Just shipped v1 and need to prioritize what's next without losing velocity
Brief is not for enterprise teams with formal PM processes (they have PMs to be the "product brain") or teams not using AI coding tools.
How Brief Works
Brief connects three critical pieces of your product development:
Your Product Context
Brief automatically collects data from tools you already use—Linear or Asana for work tracking, GitHub for your codebase, Notion or Google Drive for documentation, Fireflies for customer calls, and PostHog for analytics.
Strategic Intelligence
Brief analyzes and synthesizes this data to understand who your users are, what features you've built, what decisions you've made, your velocity, and what customers are saying.
AI Coding Agents
Brief connects to your AI coding tools (Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code) through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), making all that context available when you're coding.
Key Capabilities
MCP-Native Integration
Brief is built from the ground up to work with AI coding agents. It's not a dashboard you look at—it's context that flows into your AI tools.
Automatic Context
No manual data entry required. Brief extracts customer segments, product features, decisions, and velocity from tools you already use.
Always Up-to-Date
Brief's understanding grows over time as you connect more tools and as your product evolves. It continuously syncs with your connected tools to stay current.
Product-Native Understanding
Unlike code assistants that understand syntax, Brief understands product context: who your users are, what features you've built, what decisions you've made, and why.
Why Use Brief?
vs. Traditional PM Tools
Linear, Jira, and Notion are where work happens. Brief is why work happens. Brief reads from those tools and creates an understanding layer on top that AI can query.
Traditional tools store information; Brief synthesizes understanding. Traditional tools are for humans to read; Brief is for AI agents to query.
vs. Using AI Coding Agents Alone
| Without Brief | With Brief |
|---|---|
| AI knows code, not customers | AI knows who you're building for |
| Context resets every session | Context persists and compounds |
| AI invents features that already exist | AI checks what's already built first |
| Decisions live in Slack threads | Decisions are logged with rationale |
Example: Ask Cursor "What should we build next?" without Brief, and it'll give generic advice. Ask with Brief, and it queries your research signals, checks what's already built, reviews recent decisions, and gives you prioritized recommendations with sources.
Getting Started
Ready to try Brief? Check out our Quick Start Guide to get set up in 5 minutes.
Common Use Cases
- Onboarding new engineers who need product context fast
- Deciding what to build next based on research signals and velocity
- Understanding why past decisions were made with searchable decision history
- Keeping AI coding agents aligned with your product strategy
How does Brief work with AI coding tools?
Brief connects to AI coding tools like Cursor, Windsurf, and VS Code through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). When you're coding, your AI agent can query Brief for product context, customer insights, past decisions, and strategic direction - all without leaving your IDE.
What permissions does Brief need?
Brief needs read permissions to extract context from your connected tools. You grant these automatically during OAuth flows. For MCP write features (like creating tasks), Brief also needs write permissions to specific integrations.
How long does it take to set up Brief?
You can set up Brief in about 5 minutes. Create your account, add company information, connect your first integration (recommended: Linear), and you're done. Brief starts syncing immediately and builds understanding in the background.