turbo-start-brain

What it is

turbo-start-brain is the template we use for documentation and internal knowledge bases. It pairs a Next.js 16 docs site with Sanity Studio 6 in a single pnpm and Turborepo monorepo, on React 19 and Tailwind CSS v4. Every page, the navigation, and the site branding live in Sanity, so the people who write the docs can publish them without opening a pull request. You can see it running at turbo-start-brain.vercel.app (opens in new tab).

Pages nest by slug, so /engineering/stack sits under /engineering, and the sidebar tree, breadcrumbs, and previous and next links are all built from that one structure. Move a page in Studio and the navigation follows. Change a slug and a redirect is created for the old URL.

It's also built to be read by AI tools, not just people. Any page can be fetched as Markdown by adding .md to the URL or sending Accept: text/markdown, and /llms.txt lists every page. That makes it a good source for coding agents and chat assistants that need your team's docs as context.

What you get

• A docs layout with a collapsible sidebar, a table of contents that tracks the section on screen, and light, dark, and system themes.
• ⌘K search across titles, descriptions, and body text, running locally over your published docs with no external search service.
• An optional Ask AI dialog that answers only from a Sanity Context Knowledge Base and links each answer back to the page it came from.
• Markdown versions of every page, a "Copy as markdown" button, and a generated llms.txt.
• Page builder blocks for rich text and FAQ accordions, each with its own schema, query, component, Markdown serializer, and tests.
• Visual editing and Presentation, live preview, and redirects managed in Studio.

How to use it

Clone the repo and install with pnpm. You'll need Node 22.12 or later and a Sanity account.

git clone https://github.com/robotostudio/turbo-start-brain.git
cd turbo-start-brain
corepack enable
pnpm install

Create a Sanity project, add a Viewer token as SANITY_API_READ_TOKEN, and add http://localhost:3000 and http://localhost:3333 as CORS origins with credentials allowed. Then copy the .env.example files in apps/web and apps/studio and run pnpm dev. The web app checks its environment on startup, so it won't run until the Sanity values are set.

How we use it

We moved our own internal docs onto it, and it's where we start when a client needs a docs site or a knowledge base their team can edit. It shares its structure with turbo-start-sanity, so anyone who has worked on one of our Sanity builds will recognise the layout.