10:00 · Monday
The paste
Every job starts with an offer letter. This one is 4,623 characters, and it goes into an empty folder on your own machine.
Nothing is installed and no account is made. When the day is over, that folder is the only new thing on your disk.
~/chief-of-staff $ claude
● Claude Code · opus 5 · ~/chief-of-staff · 0 files
> I want to build my own AI chief-of-staff system, modelled on the
public blueprint at https://www.chiefofstaff.io.
Start by fetching https://www.chiefofstaff.io/llms.txt, then read
every guide in the "Core concepts" track in order, using each
guide's Markdown link…
⏎ pasted 4,623 characters · the real one is here
10:01 · one minute later
The handbook
CoS reads all 45 guides before it asks you a single question.
A new hire who has read the handbook is not impressive. One who read it before day one is — and this is the only part of your assistant that will ever be the same as everybody else's.
↓ fetching https://www.chiefofstaff.io/llms.txt
45 guides · 6 tracks · 8 pieces addressed to you rather than to it
✓What a Chief-of-Staff System Is
✓Files Are Memory, Git Is the Audit Trail
✓The Vault: Atlas, Calendar, Efforts
✓The Constitution
✓The Decision-Authority Table
✓Manager, Not Operator
✓The Daily Brief
✓Decision Records for a Life
✓…and 37 more, in order
✓ Read 45 guides · 0 accounts connected · 0 credentials requested
10:06 · the next ninety minutes
The interview
Then CoS spends ninety minutes being nosy about your ventures, your money, and the people you keep not answering.
One cluster at a time, and every answer lands in a file before the next question is asked. CoS stops when it has heard nothing new for two rounds.
Before anything else — what are the areas of your life that have their own deadlines? Anything at all, work or not.
> The atelier. A small fund. The house renovation. My family.
✓wrote Atlas/ventures/ · 4 folders, one VENTURE.md each
Family is on that list, so I am treating it as a venture with the same standing as the fund. Say if that is wrong.
> No, that is right. It is the one I drop first and should not.
✓wrote Atlas/about-me.md · noted as a standing risk
Who comes up in more than one of those four?
> Marguerite — she does fabric for the atelier and she is my sister.
✓wrote Atlas/people/marguerite.md · linked to 2 ventures
…six clusters still to go.
15:20 · by mid-afternoon
What is on disk
CoS wrote its own job description, and connected to nothing.
No mailbox, no calendar, no bank. The prompt forbids all of it on day one, and the folder CoS leaves behind has nowhere to put a password even if you offered one.
~/chief-of-staff $ git log --oneline
a3f19c2 CLAUDE.md — constitution, 17 authority rows approved line by line
7c04e81 Atlas/ — 13 ventures, 21 people, one note each
2e9b5d3 Atlas/decisions.md — 9 records, each with the condition that ends it
5f1aa07 Efforts/feedback.md — empty, and read at the start of every session
b81c4f2 commands/daily-brief — from vault contents alone, 09:00
~/chief-of-staff $ git ls-files
CLAUDE.md Atlas/ Calendar/ Efforts/ commands/
no .env · no token · no credential of any kind
✓ step 4 — do not connect to any external account today
What you have at the end of it
CoS does not remember. It rereads — every morning, from this.
Which is why the first day is the expensive part and every morning after it is cheap. Delete the folder and CoS is uninstalled: no account to close, no export to request, nobody to tell.
- chief-of-staff/ a git repository, and nothing else
- CLAUDE.md the constitution · 17 authority rows you approved
- Atlas/ what is true
- about-me.md from the interview
- decisions.md 9 records, each with the condition that would end it
- people/ 21 notes
- ventures/ 13 folders, one per area of your life
- Calendar/ what is next · briefs land here
- Efforts/ what is in flight
- feedback.md empty, and read at the start of every session
- cadence.md brief 09:00 · review Sunday
- commands/ procedures, not prompts
The model is whichever one you were already paying for. Custody and inference are not the same thing, and only one of them is on your machine.
A different door
The vault is a folder. Claude Desktop is another door onto it.
Nothing migrated, because there is nothing to migrate. Point the desktop app at the same directory and CoS is behind it — with the same files open in front of it.
What did I decide about the supplier, and when does that decision expire?
Monday, in the interview: stay with the current supplier through the spring drop, because switching costs six weeks you do not have.
It does not expire on a date. It expires if lead time goes past five weeks. You gave me four at the time and nothing has moved since, so it still stands.
Atlas/decisions.md · ADR-007 · live
I had forgotten there was a condition on it at all.
A decision that cannot expire is a decision you will keep re-making. Every record CoS writes carries the condition that would reverse it, and it watches the condition rather than the calendar.
Day 9 · 07:00
The review surface
The one surface that is supposed to hold your whole life together, and on day nine it is a filing cabinet.
A tool CoS built and runs on your own machine. Everything it knows is here, and so is everything waiting on a decision — sorted, unhelpfully, by where it came from.
Daily brief · Tuesday
Money£4,918 committed · 4 renewals this month
VenturesAtelier, week 3 of 9 · 12 others, no change
People9 open threads, none overdue
Decisions14 records · 11 still waiting on a condition
Awaiting your disposition
Day 9 · 07:02
One sentence, into the box at the bottom
So you tell CoS what the surface is for. Not what to put on it — what it is for.
No ticket, no setting, no preference pane. One sentence in the note box, which lands in the vault as a file and is read at the start of every session after it.
Daily brief · Tuesday
Money£4,918 committed · 4 renewals this month
VenturesAtelier, week 3 of 9 · 12 others, no change
People9 open threads, none overdue
Decisions14 records · 11 still waiting on a condition
Awaiting your disposition
Efforts/inbox/, then Efforts/feedback.md, committedDay 10 · 04:00
While you were asleep
Overnight CoS rewrote its own surface, and the first thing on it is a decision that had quietly expired nine days earlier.
Same facts, same four o’clock rebuild, same tool. Sorted, for the first time, by what they cost you to ignore — and nobody shipped a thing to make that happen.
Needs you before Monday · 3
Everything else, folded
Moneyas it was, minus the two above
Ventures13, none of them moved
People9 open threads, none overdue
What just happened
That is what it means to have hired one. You said it once, to CoS, and the job changed.
The thing that renders your morning is a file in your own folder. There is no roadmap to petition and nobody whose quarter it has to fit into.
The review surface · Ask it to build you the view
Every figure, file and date on this page is invented, like everything in the demo vault. Nobody real appears on this site, by rule.
Day 11 · 07:41
In the car
Thirty-eight seconds of talking, and five facts land in five files before you have found your keys.
By the second week you have stopped opening a laptop to talk to CoS. Notice what it did not do: it did not book the dentist, because you gave it no date. Guessing would have been the more impressive reply and the more expensive one.
Got all five.
- Supplier lead time 4w → 6w
suppliers.md - ADR-007 — past five weeks, so the condition you set has been met needs you
- Fabric quote owed to you, nine days
people/ - School run moves to Thursdays
family/ - “Dentist” — no date given, parked in capture
One of those needs you today: the supplier call you made in the interview has just stopped being the right one.
07:41Sunday 18:04 · the weekly review, inbound
On Sunday, CoS goes shopping.
The Sunday review reaches outward as well as in. CoS fetches guides.json, diffs it against everything it has already read, and brings back one line on each. You say yes, not yes-and-how.
New from chiefofstaff.io · 3 since last Sunday
Reminders run by a dispatcher with no model in it. Would end the 07:00 double-ping.
yesAn outbound voice agent. Not yet — there is nothing it would need to call about.
not yetPrivacy without a datacenter. Worth it the week the health notes move in.
holdThis is the part that compounds. The system you paste on Monday is not the system you have in March, and you did not do the upgrading.
Sunday 18:09 · the weekly review, outbound
Five minutes later, CoS asks permission to be useful to the rest of the CoS community.
Same review, the other direction. CoS found one thing you solved this week that would generalise, and wants to put it where the guides it just read came from. Nothing leaves the vault until you say yes, and the names, numbers and counterparties come out before a draft exists.
Splitting the payables radar into evidence and assumed held up three times this week. That generalises.
Want me to write it up for the CoS community? I would take out the suppliers, the amounts and the dates first, and show you the draft before anything is sent.
18:04yes
18:06 ✓✓chiefofstaff.io · from the community
Never-Late Money Ops: A Payables Radar with Honest Evidence
by your name here · yourdomain.com
A human reads every submission for two things, in that order: whether it leaks anything about you, and whether it is useful to somebody who has none of your context. How contributing works
The part that is yours
The last thing CoS needs is the only thing you cannot delegate.
CoS has read 45 guides. You get 8 pages. The people who end up with a colleague and the people who end up with a nuisance are about forty minutes of reading apart.
Before you have one
Once it is running
- Correct it, don't complain Put the correction where it will be read again. 4 min
- Hire narrow, then widen Start every specialist at the narrowest charter that does anything. 5 min
- You are the security boundary Scope every key in time or in number, at the moment you hand it over. 6 min
- When you talk to it, and when you don't Your day does not run through it. That is deliberate. 5 min
The training, in order — six of the eight are above, and the whole track is thirty-eight minutes.