Life OS · Open Source

An operating
system for
a life.

A personal operating system that lives as plain markdown files — and an AI that runs it with you. No app. No account. Just text, and a conversation.

View on GitHub → How it works
~/lifeos $ claude   > hello   "I'm the assistant for your LifeOS — a system that lives as plain files on your machine. Want to take five minutes to set it up? I'll fill things in as we go, one question at a time."   > let's go   "First — what should I call you?"

The Idea

Structure you can actually keep.

I built Life OS because the tools meant to organise a life kept becoming another thing to manage. Apps to maintain. Accounts to remember. Data locked somewhere I couldn't see.

"The best system is the one you actually keep — not the one with the most features."

So I stripped it back to the most durable format there is: plain text files in a folder. Your goals, habits, projects, the rhythm of your week, and an honest record of how things are really going. Then I let Claude Code read those files and run the thing with me — a morning check-in, an evening close, weekly reviews that name the patterns I'd rather not see.

No dashboard. No lock-in. Just a conversation with something that remembers what matters to you, and keeps you honest about it.

How It Works

From zero to a working system.

Step 01

Get the files

Download or clone the repo into a folder you like. It's a small set of markdown files and the protocols that drive them — nothing to install, nothing to sign up for.

Step 02

Open Claude Code

Point Claude Code at that folder. It reads your operating system at the start of every conversation, so it always has the full context of your life — not just the message you typed.

Step 03

Say hello

That's the whole setup. It walks you through building your system — one question at a time — and fills in the files as you talk. About five minutes to something that's genuinely yours.

Why Plain Markdown

Boring on purpose. That's the point.

01

It's yours

Everything stays in a folder on your machine. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is locked in a product. Back it up however you like.

02

It's legible

You can read and edit every file by hand. No black box, no proprietary format. The whole system is text you can understand.

03

It outlives any tool

Markdown will still open in fifty years. Your operating system shouldn't depend on a company staying in business.

04

It holds the hard stuff too

A life isn't only its productivity. There's room to tell the system what you carry — so it reads your weeks with care, not just efficiency.

Take It

Open source.
Make it yours.

The whole thing is editable text under an MIT license. Change the protocols, rename the areas, add your own triggers, throw out what doesn't fit. The structure is a starting point that works — not a doctrine.

# clone it, then open Claude Code and say hello git clone https://github.com/jeanjmauris/lifeos.git ~/lifeos cd ~/lifeos && claude
View on GitHub → Back to home

Why I built it

A note

I built this in a hard season, when getting the week to hold felt like the whole job. Structure, it turns out, is not the enemy of a full life — it's what makes room for one.

Sebastian shot on film because he wanted to slow down and actually see. This is my version of that: a quiet system that asks me to look honestly at how I'm living, and keep going.

Built to keep going. Shared in case it helps you do the same.