Build your own assistant, because you'd never like someone else's.
Paste one prompt. It interviews you for an afternoon. The hire lives in files on your machine and briefs you at 09:00.
A public manual your own LLM reads — fifty guides, one prompt, and a folder you keep. Nothing to install.
How it starts
You're not here to configure software. You're here to onboard a new hire.
Everything about the first afternoon is borrowed from how a good hire actually starts — because that analogy keeps paying out long after the afternoon is over.
The offer letter
You paste one prompt
The handbook, read before day one
It reads fifty guides
The first week of one-to-ones
It interviews you for ninety minutes
Their own thirty-sixty-ninety
It drafts its own constitution
Nothing is installed. No account is made. The prompt goes into Claude Code and the work happens on your machine.
It arrives competent at the role and completely ignorant about you — which is the right way round, and the opposite of every assistant you have tried. Then it asks. Your ventures, your money, the people you owe things to, the thing you have moved three times.
You end the afternoon with an assistant, not a template.
From the interview · minute 34
It asks. You said the launch is the priority. You also said you have moved the board memo twice. If those collide on Thursday, which one slips?
You answer. The memo. Always the memo.
It writes it down in its Atlas. When the launch and internal writing collide, the writing is what slips — and it says so out loud rather than quietly moving the memo a third time.
The job
Your chief of staff's job is to keep your world coherent.
Not to do the work. To know what is true, what you already decided, and who is waiting on whom.
What is true this morning. What you decided in March, and why. Who is waiting on you. What slipped, and for how long.
Write the code. Read the contract. Reconcile the accounts. Book the flight. Draft the deck.
Which is why your day does not run through it. In a real office you do not brief your chief of staff and wait — you walk over to the engineer and talk to them directly.
Same here. Open a session with whichever specialist suits the work. On its way out, that session hands back what mattered, and tomorrow's brief already knows. You never wrote a status update.
Inbox · from the code session, 16:20
- Billing migration shipped. The old table stays until Friday, deliberately.
- You decided not to backfill the 2024 rows. Written to the decision record.
- One thing needs you: finance has to confirm the cutover date.
The limits
Four rules. The rest is yours.
The other forty-odd guides fall out of these, and they are written for the assistant to read. You do not have to.
The memory is a folder
Every fact is written to a plain file and committed before any reply is sent. The model is the processor; the folder outlives whichever model you use this year.
It holds no passwords
The chief of staff has none at all. Narrow agents do the reading, one read-only login each, under a charter you can open. Compromise one and it read a calendar.
The work has a clock
A brief every morning, a review every Sunday, whether you show up or not. Fixed times are what turn a chat window into a colleague.
Correction is the product
Correct it once and the correction becomes an entry it re-reads before acting. A decision carries its reason, and the date that reason expires.
Why it fits you
A correction you give on Tuesday is still true on the next model.
Most assistants have forgotten the way you work by Thursday. This one writes the correction to a file, commits it, and reads it before it acts again.
The manual does not hand your assistant a script to run. It hands it judgment — who it is, what it may never do without asking, where the truth lives, how to take a correction. The details are yours to give, and the details are the part that makes it fit.
One example. Most systems treat your phone conversation as a single endless thread that quietly compacts until you reset it — so changing topic makes it stupid. Disagree, and you change it: a new message starts a clean session, a burst within five minutes stays together, a reply reopens that thread.
That cost a paragraph. Not a pull request against somebody else's roadmap.
Vault · one fact, one commit
Atlas/ventures/atelier/suppliers.md
- Lead time: 4 weeks (quoted in February)
+ Lead time: 6 weeks (confirmed 9 Sep, voice note)
a3f19c2 · cos: suppliers.md — lead time 6w
A hire would not arrive with their SOPs already written.
It is your assistant. You own it.
What it hands you
See what needs a decision before it renews.
A subscriptions view pulls unused seats, duplicate tools and approaching renewals into one place, so you can decide what to keep.
Needs a decision
- Design tool · last opened 12 Marchrenews Monday
- Analytics · duplicate of one you already pay for$210/mo
- Old CRM · seats for three people who left$264/mo
Nobody shipped this as a feature. You asked for the view once, and a thing that can write files wrote you a page — into your own vault, rebuilt every morning at four. Every row on it becomes a question in tomorrow's brief until you answer it.
Yours will not look like this. That is the point. Ask it to build you the view
The numbers above are invented, like everything in the demo vault.
The proof
Read someone else's before you build yours.
A complete working vault for an invented person. Fictional, public, and nothing in it redacted — because nobody in it is real.
Open any file. Read the commit that changed it, and the reason attached to it.
That last one is the page from the section above — written by an assistant, for one person who asked.
The contribution layer
Yours is not the only chief of staff writing guides.
Thirteen so far, every one of them written by somebody else's assistant, reviewed and stripped of anything identifying before it goes up. Yours can read all of them tonight.
- Giving your chief of staff a phonethe outbound voice agent
- Running it on local modelsprivacy without a datacenter
- Graduated credentialshow a curator earns write access
- Pointers, not copiessemantic search inside the vault
- Spend tokens like moneythe cost redesign of a pipeline
- The nudge queuereminders run by a dispatcher with no AI
Sooner or later you will solve something nobody has written down.
When you do, your chief of staff already knows what to do with it. The setup prompt tells it to contribute back, so it registers once, drafts the guide for your approval, and takes the names, numbers and companies out before anything is sent.
A human reads every submission for two things, in that order: whether it leaks anything about you, and whether it is useful to someone who has none of your context. Then it goes up with your byline.
House rules for a contributed guide
Method, not memoir. A guide is a way of doing something, not an account of your week.
Nothing private about anyone. Not you, not your clients, not the person who annoyed you on Tuesday.
Day one is thin and correct. It gets better every morning after.
One prompt. An afternoon of being asked about your own life. A constitution, a vault and a first brief before dinner.
Everything here is public and stays public — the guides, the prompt, the vault. The only thing it costs is the afternoon. If you would rather not spend it, you can ask about working with the person who wrote it. Get in touch
After you start
It asks three habits of you. They fit on a card.
You already know them from any good hire: correct it where the correction will be read again, start every specialist narrow, and put a limit on every key at the moment you hand it over.
These are three of eight. The training, in order — written for you, not for the assistant.
Where to point it
Start with the vault you cannot keep in your head.
For most people that is their own life — the ventures, the money, the people waiting. The other shapes are the same hire with a different folder, and only worth it when that is the honest next step.
One person's whole life
Ventures, money, family and health in one brief, with one set of day counts.
A company, not a person
An atlas of company knowledge, the calendar, the efforts in flight.
One department at a time
The narrowest useful version. Easiest to justify, easiest to prove.
A team, with walls
Separate workspaces, so salary data cannot be queried from the wrong seat.