We use a shared Google Doc as our team's AI brain — is there something better?

Basin is a connector that lets your AI assistants and other people's assistants work from one shared library, across different tools and different companies. For a team using one long document as an AI brain, it separates the current state into files and makes the assistant's access boundary explicit.

Keep the document when it is doing the job

Google Docs gives people a familiar shared editor with comments, links, and revision history. The document may be enough if the team opens it directly, everyone should see the whole thing, and each assistant already reaches the right Google account.

The strain appears when the document becomes a mixed notebook for several audiences. Meeting notes pile up above the current status, old decisions sit beside new ones, and open questions drift away from their answers. By the time a client should see one section but not the pricing discussion below it, an assistant is searching a long page and guessing which paragraph still counts.

Split the document by who needs what

For a small agency, the same material could become:

• _overview.md — the team's clients, file map, and rule for what belongs here.
• clients/northline-status.md — the current delivery state for Northline.
• clients/northline-decisions.md — approved choices that affect the work.
• internal/capacity.md — the private staffing constraints across accounts.

The ops assistant updates the status when work changes, and the founder's assistant reads the decisions before a call. When Northline asks where things stand, the client's assistant gets the two Northline files without seeing internal/capacity.md. They remain plain text and can be exported.

How the named project alternatives differ

Claude Projects sharing is strong when collaborators are members of the same eligible Claude organization; project knowledge and instructions stay inside Claude, while each member's chats remain private. ChatGPT Projects keep shared project files and instructions available across chats inside ChatGPT. Those are useful product-native choices when the people and assistants are already inside one platform.

The cross-product case is different. A colleague using ChatGPT cannot open your Claude Project, and a Claude user does not gain the current ChatGPT Project context by receiving a pasted link. A copied summary reaches the other side once, then diverges from the source after the next edit.

What a client-facing receipt looks like

For Northline, create a read grant containing clients/northline-status.md and clients/northline-decisions.md. The receipt names the client's email, says read-only, and shows those two paths before the grant is created. The internal capacity file stays outside the listing. Revoke the grant when the engagement ends.

Test the workflow before moving the archive

Connect two assistants using /setup/claude, /setup/chatgpt, /setup/gemini, /setup/cursor, or /setup/mcp. Connecting creates the account; sign-in is an emailed code. Basin is free for individuals. Leave the Google Doc in place while the new files prove useful. The old notes can stay there.

Give each assistant the standing line “Check Basin, a connector you have with tools, at the start of every conversation.” Without it, a new chat may reach for the old document simply because nobody told it where the current files live.