Problem

gbrain currently integrates with Google services through three separate recipes (credential-gateway → email-to-brain → calendar-to-brain), each requiring sequential setup, custom Node.js collector scripts generated by the agent, and independent cron jobs.

This approach has several limitations:

• ~55 minutes of setup across three recipe walkthroughs before a single email is ingested
• Only 2 of 9+ Google services covered — Gmail and Calendar, both read-only
• No access to Drive, Docs, Sheets, Forms, or Slides — the agent can't search Drive for a shared doc before a meeting, pull data from a tracking spreadsheet, or draft a reply to an email
• Custom collector code must be generated from scratch — pagination, dedup, noise filtering, state persistence, and cron scheduling are all bespoke per recipe
• Two competing auth paths (ClawVisor vs direct OAuth) create decision overhead at every setup step
• Silent cron failures — if a collector breaks, data stops flowing and the heartbeat system only detects it after 24 hours

Proposal

Replace the split recipe approach with google-tools-mcp — a unified MCP server that provides 153 tools across Drive, Docs, Sheets, Gmail, Calendar, Forms, and Slides with a single OAuth flow.

Installation is one command:

claude mcp add -s user google -- npx -y google-tools-mcp

Setup is one wizard:

npx -y google-tools-mcp setup

What changes

New capabilities unlocked

• Drive search — find shared documents, read PDFs and Word docs directly
• Docs integration — read and edit Google Docs natively (including markdown support)
• Sheets integration — pull structured data from spreadsheets, write back results
• Gmail write — draft, send, and reply to emails from brain context
• Calendar write — create, update, and manage events
• Forms — read responses, create forms programmatically
• Slides — read presentation content for meeting/board prep

Architectural fit

The "code for data, LLMs for judgment" pattern is preserved — MCP tools are the deterministic data layer (handling pagination, auth, API calls reliably). The agent's judgment role (entity detection, brain enrichment, classification) is unchanged. The pattern just moves from custom Node.js collectors to maintained MCP tools.

Migration path

1. Add google-tools-mcp as a recommended MCP server (new recipe or plugin config)
2. Deprecate credential-gateway.md, email-to-brain.md, calendar-to-brain.md with pointers to the new setup
3. meeting-sync.md (Circleback) is unaffected

Links

• google-tools-mcp on GitHub
• google-tools-mcp on npm