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Personal life OS

A shared vault for you and your AI agents.

One Obsidian vault. A clear folder hierarchy. Areas hold your ongoing work, projects serve areas, and archives keep what is finished. This is the backbone of a personal operating system that both you and AI agents can understand and maintain together.

I built this as a starting structure for a personal knowledge vault that both I and AI agents can read: one AGENTS.md for instructions, plain folders for notes, and nothing clever in between.

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Built for Obsidian and AI agents

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Behaviour contract
AGENTS.md
Active
·9,509 bytes

Template structure

Core files
4
Top-level folders
6
Scripts
3
MIT licence
✓

Building blocks

What you get

  1. 01

    Agent Contract

    One AGENTS.md at the root defines how all agents work here: precedence, planning, memory, logging and naming.

  2. 02

    Areas as the Backbone

    Areas hold your ongoing responsibilities (career, money, home, health), projects serve areas, archives hold what is finished.

  3. 03

    Smart Memory

    MEMORY.md stays small (300-line ceiling). LOG.md is append-only. ARCHIVE.md holds what used to be true. INBOX.md for later.

Six top-level foldersAreas, Projects, HQ, Knowledge, Archive and Resources.
Privacy by conventionAny folder named Records/ is gitignored, so personal papers never reach GitHub.

Explore

Browse the template

Vault Structure

Getting started

Three commands to set up your vault.

Step 1
git clone github.com/your-user/life-system-template

Clone the template to your machine

Step 2
python3 scripts/init.py

Initialize the vault structure

Step 3
python3 scripts/check.py

Verify the setup is complete

Core files

Contract
AGENTS.md
Memory
MEMORY.md
Log
LOG.md
Archive
ARCHIVE.md

Then open it

Open the folder as a vault in Obsidian and start your agent session. Agents will read AGENTS.md and follow the system you define.

The 300-line ceiling on memory files forces you to archive what is no longer current, and that discipline alone makes agents far more useful.

About this template

A file-based personal OS.

This is a generic template adapted from a personal life-system vault used daily, with all personal detail removed. The system provides three verified scripts: check.py, vault-link.py and paths-check.py.

Provenance. Everything here is plain Markdown that you, your team and your AI agents can read and update together. The folder structure follows the PARA method (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives) adapted for AI collaboration.

What I learned

Building this taught me that the structure matters more than the tools. A good naming convention is worth a thousand tags. The 300-line ceiling on memory files forces you to archive what is no longer current, and that discipline alone makes agents far more useful. The append-only log turned out to be the one source of truth I could always trust.

Key principles

  • Areas are ongoing responsibilities that never truly finish
  • Projects serve areas and have a done state
  • Memory stays under 300 lines by archiving old truths
  • Log is append-only and never edited

MIT licence. Built for humans and agents. Deployed at rin.contact

Start building your vault.

Clone the template, run the setup scripts, and open it in Obsidian. Your agents will read AGENTS.md and follow the system you define.

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