It may be the fact that no one's listening to this podcast, and
it's probably a bit of a bubble, but it feels like right now
there's another zeitgeist in the world of AI emerging.
And it's hard to give AI systems true 24/7 contexts of everything
in your life, your projects, and to create what you could
describe as a true memory system or a personal AI operating
system for your clod. And this second brain isn't
really for you, it's for your agents.
Most of the content online about productivity and planning and
organization is optimising for human readability with good ways
for us to take notes in different systems.
But the world is no longer for us and our second brain, it's
for agents having a second brain.
By the end of this episode, you'll have your own personal AI
operating system by building a second brain for your agents, An
exact file structure to copy the different sections that you're
going to create to create a the different sections that you're
going to build to give fantastic scalable structure for your
agent to do more work for you. And a daily routine that you can
eventually automate, which will keep this continually updated.
This in the loop with Jack Horton.
I hope you enjoyed the show. So let's start where this wave
has come from, this like drive to build AI operating systems.
Now it hit mainstream popularity recently because of Andre
Capathi posting online about his MLM knowledge kind of wiki in
early April. And it's basically how he
organized his own notes so AI can read them.
And he sparked an explosion of different people and thought
leaders and influencers sharing how essentially they create
their own note system but for agents to read from.
But in reality, this has come from coding, as I said a good
number of episodes ago, probably all the way back to that called
Co work episode. The huge revolution that hit
coding is just going to hit the entire rest of the world over
the next 12 to 18 months. And a big part of that has been
your structure of information that you feed to an agent.
Now I've started to touch on this.
I touched on the Co work episode, I touched it on the
skills episode, I touched it on the episode discussing automated
scheduled tasks and and other new features they've just
released. And essentially this is a set of
folders on your computer which are MD files, So plain text
files arranged in a particular order.
So whenever an agent you're working with starts its session,
it can access it and then it will follow that folder
structure to only get the relevant information it needs at
that exact moment. Now inside that folder going to
leave four kinds of thing. And once you see them as four
separate jobs, the architecture of this folder structure makes
sense. And just before I get into this,
if you remember, for those that have been using Co work now, for
those that are in, you know, in IDE and to do coding, you're
going to be very familiar with this.
But essentially local files on your desktop or your laptop is
the folder of this type of system.
So a folder structure. And essentially you're going to
have different folders within, or should I say subfolders
within a master folder. And for some of you that might
go well, that doesn't seem that special, but it's exactly how
the most efficient organizations in the world are running the
system. It's how we run a lot of our
teams. Now there's a caveat to this,
which I think this is a moment in time and this is something
that you should use, but I mean mindset, this is the product
that we're currently building to help with product development.
So engineering design, product management, which is a system to
take us away from just relying on local files just, and it's an
infinitely more scalable, but for a personal operating system,
it's really, really powerful. So the first folder, or let's
say job, is identity. So that's the file that tells
the agent who you are, how you work, what you never do.
You know the bit that just shouldn't really ever change.
It might include your communication style, your
decision principles, maybe you know some of the rules that
you'd never break. The second is context.
So what's, what does the world look like today for you?
You know, what are the key projects that you're working on
over the next one, three, six months?
Who are the key people in that, in that world?
You know, who's your boss, who's your colleagues?
What do they like? What do they don't like?
They might also be commitments you've made and you refuse to
relegate them. And they could also include the
active projects in flight. The third is your skills.
So these are repeatable workflows.
You know, we've talked about skills a few weeks ago.
There are multi step processes about how you approach different
problems and situations and scenarios, whether it's a
script, an e-mail, a deal review, a weekly e-mail summary
to your boss, whatever it might be.
And the 4th is memory. So that's what happened, what
you decided, what open decisions there are still essentially it's
a session log from yesterday that the agent will pick up from
every single day. This part in particular is where
what we call Memex, our new product that it were releasing
at the moment, is essentially scaling because as you can
imagine, the amount of decisions getting logged to give your
agent a second brain is insane. So that's where we've had to
build our own internal tool to fix because we've got an entire
company trying to manage this type of system.
Anyway, to summarize those types of jobs you've got, essentially
identity is going to capture the unchangeable and then context
captures the things that are going to perish.
So you're going to update and change them every month, 3
weeks, 2 days, six months. Skills capture the things that
are very repeatable and memory captures the historical
conversations that you've been having.
So 4 jobs all sitting inside one parent folder structure that any
agent can read. Now the shape of that parent
folder, in case you're, you know, on a walk you're trying to
imagine this is, is roughly as follows.
At the top of that folder is what we call a master file.
So essentially by convention in core code that's called the claw
dot MD. But in other tools, the same
content goes as essentially a set of instructions or folder
instructions that essentially tells the agent how to
understand and navigate the folder structure.
That master file holds the identity layer plus pointers to
everything else. So essentially you're directing
the AI when and when not to use these sets of systems and
information. Alongside it sits A context
folder. So that will hold files are
active projects dot MD, recent decisions dot MD, stakeholders
dot MD, constraints dot MD, and then a skills folder.
And that skills folder will have the subfolder and it will have
all the skills inside it. So that could be your e-mail
skill, your shout at someone's skill, your apology skill, you
know, whatever it might be. Then finally you've got a memory
folder, which is essentially a big memory MD document with
topic specific files. So that will have a daily folder
with one log per session. So it might have today's date or
tomorrow's date. So then every sets of
conversations you have with different agents, you can update
that log. So essentially, there you go, 6
folders. You got one master file to tell
the agent how to use all of it. It's all just text.
And that's the architecture. And by creating that scalable
system, you don't ever have to speak to an agent as if it
doesn't understand what you're trying to achieve.
It just has all the context you need immediately.
And then when you try and choose the very best model and have
maximum reasoning mode on there, you're going to get the best
results. And because you're not trying to
give it too much context in one setting, you can also reduce the
context window and therefore have less token usage.
And now we're going to move on one step deeper.
Let's write the master file since you know that's the the
doorway the agent will step through when understanding the
rest of your personal operating system.
So Section 1 might be a company overview.
You know, two or three sentence about who you work for, what
they do, what stage of the business there are Section 2
will be current priorities. So top three or four things
you're trying to do this next quarter specific outcomes rather
than, you know, random, you know, themes, you know, maybe
hire two people by the end of March.
Section 3 is you know your voice and tone, how you communicate
the words you band, the style references you like to write
towards. For example, I have an entire
set of information on banned words.
I'll get some of them up. Corporate therapist book voices
banned. This is a powerful opportunity
to lean into our strengths. A meaningless conclusion.
AI loves meaningless conclusions at the end of a paragraph.
You know. Ultimately the goal of an
organization is to be more resilient and agile.
Pointless or the keynote punchline.
Voice the forced negation stating the obvious back all the
time over a flattery and excessive adverb.
So I've got an entire I mean, gosh, it's so big at this point,
right? Maybe 1200 Word document on all
the things I absolutely hate. Section 4 will be your key
relationship. So it might be people at work
could be people at home. So it might be, you know, my CEO
is called X. They care about why they respond
better to this and this type of and topic area or behaviour.
So just information that's relevant to the people you work
with and also their skills. Section 5 is standing decisions,
so things you've already agreed on and don't want the agent to
have to re question. And section 6 is things you
don't do, the constraints, maybe the things that you've got out
of scope you refuse to consider doing.
You know, I don't do X before 9:00 AM, whatever it might be.
And that's the template, that's the whole file should be about
150 lines roughly. And if something feels like I
want to add more words than 150 to 200 lines, you should
reference the skills. And we'll come on to this in a
minute. But you say use X skill under Y
situation, and that can then have many, many more texts or
lines of text. And 200 is the really important
number here because Anthropics actual documentation says that
any master file over 200 lines will essentially just be
ignored. So the agent will only read 199
or 200 lines of the 200 line and documents.
So if you made a 500 word one, it won't actually be useful, it
won't be used by the agent. So that's the system, that's the
master file to give your agents instructions.
And I'm going to go into two more things.
So it's going to be the skills folder and the structure.
I'm not going to spend too much time here because I actually
encourage you to go and use or listen to the skills episode.
And I'm also going to describe the daily routine you must
follow to make this entire system work.
So starting with the skills folder, essentially this whole
thing stops obviously being just static instructions for an
agent. And then it becomes like an
operating system when you essentially have lots of skills
and scheduled tasks working. So you know, every time you have
a workflow that you do more than two, three times, you should
turn it into a skill. And you're going to have a
folder that is going to have all of your skills inside it.
And the agent should just be able to structure it.
So if you've opened desktop Commander or if you're allowed
the agent to take control of your local files, just tell it
to organize the skills, put it inside the folder structure that
you created. Again, I would say there's tell
cords or tell whatever system that you're using to do it for
you. It could be discovery and
conversation prep and you could have a skill there that before
any call generate 5 hypothesis LED questions maybe to this
prospects industry and always frame questions as a hypothesis
to test, not a fact because we want them to confirm.
Could be as simple as that or something highly complex.
Some people have been quite ambitious.
They've got literally like 24/7 content engine runs going,
generating ideas, drafting scripts, writing SOP's, creating
slide decks, just doing so so much.
But that that's going to cost you an absolute fortune.
And the important thing is that once you build this architecture
that I'm describing, you can really start to turn it into an
operating system because identity tells the agent who's
running the workflow, Context tells it the current state of
the world, skills tell it how to actually run that specific task.
And as I'll come on to it in a minute, you'll have a daily log
system that will keep track of all major decisions that are
made. And all of this can be happening
on a scheduled routine. So every time the agent is doing
this task, you don't need to prompt it.
It is just taking all the information that you've already
built through this architecture. And this comes on to the final
part, which is that daily session log loop that I
mentioned right at the start. So before we end every single
session, we're now going to write a session log.
We're going to literally tell the agent write a session log.
It's going to cover what we worked on with the agent, and it
should only be about 3 bullet points Max.
You can turn this into a skill. So you can go slash daily log
and tell it where to store that information.
So store this in X place within the file structure I've created
and label it by the day of the week and the time we made it.
And it should, yeah, as I said, it should cover what we that
what you and the agent worked on, the decisions made with any
reasoning, any open questions that are going to be need to be
covered next time, any files that were touched and anything
in the memory MD that should be updated based on the session or
anything that needs to be changed to skills or anything
else as a result of that session.
So those were very highly structured because the agent can
then scan it and we'll just have that information immediately.
And you can get quite clever here.
You could run a scheduled task called weekly review where on a
Sunday, for example, where it reads all of the daily journals
or updates or logs, maps them against annual objectives, key
priorities, and essentially give a review of progress and things
that we need to make sure we do next week.
So you can do quite clever things with this as well.
So they help progress other initiatives you might be trying
to get through. And anytime you you find it
going wrong, tell it to update the master doc, tell it to
update something in the system to improve this.
So it's continually growing and improving.
So yeah, let's let's wrap up. So I guess my call to action to
everyone listening is go and get on this properly.
You know, set up a folder, dedicate an hour, I'll put it
inside a link in the Apple and Spotify podcast show notes so
you can get access to this. But go and create that
substructure or that folder structure with those subfolders.
It'll take you less than an hour and suddenly you'll start to be
able to create a true AI operating system.
And I bet if you do that, by the end of the week, the agent's
going to know more about you and your work.
And just save so much time of no, don't do it like this, do it
like that type conversations that that one hour will save you
many, many more hours. Anyway, thank you for listening
and I'll see you next time.