Life OS - Personal Operating System

This project organizes different areas of my life into independent "vaults", each with its own context and purpose.

Active Vaults

• identity/ - Foundational material (story, core beliefs)
• prompts/ - Capture, test, and curate prompts from any source
• vocabulary/ - Words and concepts with informal definitions, sorted alphabetically
• zettelkasten/ - Zettelkasten system for taking notes and references

Deprecated Vaults

• tweets/ - Thoughts and posts for Twitter/X
• writing/ - Content creation for newsletter and blog

General Conventions

• Each vault has its own CLAUDE.md with specific instructions

Available Skills

Skills are located in .claude/skills/ and activate automatically based on context.

Setting Up Skills (Symbolic Links)

Why Symbolic Links?

Claude Code requires all skills to live in a flat structure inside .claude/skills/. However, managing all skills in a single folder quickly becomes chaotic—it's hard to know which skill belongs to which vault.

The solution: keep skills organized within their respective vaults, and use symbolic links to satisfy Claude Code's requirement. This way:

• Each vault owns and maintains its own skills (e.g., vocabulary/_skills/save-word/)
• You edit skills directly inside each vault
• The symlinks in .claude/skills/ automatically point to the real files
• Claude Code finds and activates the skills as expected

How the Script Works

1. Searches for all SKILL.md files inside your vaults
2. Creates a folder in .claude/skills/ with the naming convention {vault}-{skill-id}
3. Creates a symbolic link pointing back to the original SKILL.md

Usage

# 1. Navigate to the project root
cd /Users/serudda/Documents/Projects/life-os

# 2. Make the script executable (only needed once)
chmod +x _scripts/setup-skills.sh

# 3. Run the script
./_scripts/setup-skills.sh

When to Run

• After creating a new skill in any vault
• After cloning the repo on a new machine
• After renaming or moving skill folders

Example Output

🚀 Mapping Skills Structure (Folder + SKILL.md)...
✅ Structure ready: vocabulary-save-word/SKILL.md
✅ Structure ready: prompts-prompt-generator/SKILL.md
✨ Portals configured correctly.

Quick Navigation with Vault Aliases

Why Aliases?

Navigating to different vaults requires typing long paths like cd /Users/serudda/Documents/Projects/life-os/vocabulary. With aliases, you simply type the vault name (e.g., vocabulary) and you're there.

How It Works

The script _scripts/generate-aliases.sh:

1. Scans all vault folders (excluding those starting with . or _)
2. Creates an alias for each vault that does cd to that folder
3. Adds itself to your ~/.zshrc automatically (first time only)
4. Activates the aliases immediately in your current shell

Usage

# Navigate to the project root first
cd /Users/serudda/Documents/Projects/life-os

# Run with 'source' to activate aliases immediately
source _scripts/generate-aliases.sh

Important

You must use source (not ./) for the aliases to work in your current terminal. This is a shell limitation—scripts cannot modify the parent shell unless sourced.

When to Run

• First time: Run once to set everything up
• After adding a new vault: Run again to add the new alias
• New machine: Run once after cloning the repo

Example Output

🧠 Generating Life-OS aliases...

  ✓ identity
  ✓ breakdowns
  ✓ prompts
  ✓ vocabulary
  ✓ writing

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
✅ Generated 5 vault aliases + 'lifeos' root alias
📄 File: /Users/serudda/Documents/Projects/life-os/.life-os-aliases

🔗 Already integrated with ~/.zshrc
⚡ Aliases activated in current shell!

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
🎉 Done! Try typing 'vocabulary' or 'lifeos' now.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━