# My personal agent is just a folder > Source: > Published: 2026-11-11 01:42:13+00:00 *If you've wondered what a "personal agent" looks like in practice, this is mine: no app, no server, just a folder of Markdown files and a coding agent pointed at it. At the end there's a folder layout and the rules file, so you can start your own.* Yesterday I was a bit tired and almost skipped the gym. Before heading out, I asked the AI offhand: "If I train back today, which exercises should I do?" It said that if I was tired I should go lighter, taking 20 to 30 percent off last time's weights, then lined up four exercises, three sets each. With the plan in front of me, I actually wanted to go. In the evening I told it, one by one, what I'd eaten at each meal and how much each cost, and finally asked: "How much did I spend today? Did I get enough protein?" It worked out how much protein I was still short, reminded me to have a scoop of protein powder, logged the spending in my ledger, and checked it against this month's budget while it was at it. I didn't type a word of this. I said it all into my phone's voice input. Small things that used to take me ages to decide, I now say in a sentence and hand over. What does these things for me is my personal agent. It isn't an app, just a folder on my computer. I open it in Claude Code, and the agent works inside it. Fitness is only one of its modules. The whole folder looks roughly like this: I described this diagram to it, and it drew it. The folder also opens directly in Obsidian: the AI writes in it, and I read in Obsidian. Files link to each other with wikilinks, so one click takes you to the source, and you can see everywhere a note is referenced. I think four parts are useful to everyone: Everything else is modules, added as needed. Everyone lives differently, so everyone needs different modules: When I need something new, I make a new folder and write its rules at the top of its main file. The fitness and spending modules came about a few days ago when I casually said "I'd like to log this every day", and it built them on the spot. The more I use it, the more I notice tasks with fixed steps that keep coming back, so I distil them into skills: a write-up of the steps, sometimes with a script. The ones worth keeping show up while doing the work: this will come up again, and it'd be useful elsewhere too. There are seven now, such as converting recording transcripts to Markdown, importing ebooks, making Xiaohongshu cards (Xiaohongshu is a Chinese lifestyle social app), and pushing articles into my WeChat Official Account's drafts. How to write Xiaohongshu copy could be distilled the same way later; writing it down is what keeps it consistent. For the folder to be useful, it needs enough material. But at first it was empty. I didn't write any scripts to move things in. I just gave the AI my Notion and flomo API keys, let it pull everything itself, and watched. Later I gave it access to the whole computer to dig through old records, and installed Claude Code on my old university laptop too. Personal projects, little demos, my graduation project and lab reports: it turned them all up, one by one. Once it finds things, it also files them in the right places. When it found which zip file held my graduation project's code, it added that to my university experience while it was there. My dated records now go back to June 2021, more than 1,200 days. That's the foundation of how it knows me. Later I'd like to photograph my handwritten journals and bring them in too, to see how I've changed over the years. Fitness and meals are only the most everyday uses. Over the past month I've also used it for: Reading and learning new fields deserve a few more words. Reading has become a conversation. As I read, I tell the AI what I'm thinking: a line that struck me, a word I don't know, a question the page raises. It annotates along with me, explains things, and fills in the background. Sometimes it draws a map. When I was reading *Paris* from Bloom's Literary Places, I didn't know much about the city. It just drew me a map of Paris with the places from the book, so I didn't have to go searching websites myself. A book also leads somewhere else. Napoleon came up while I was reading about Paris, and I realised I didn't really know what he had done. So I asked, and he went onto my list of things I want to understand. All of these conversations are saved in the book's own folder, next to the book. When I finish, we go through my notes a few at a time and build a mind map together, each node linking back to its place in the book. Reading used to end when I closed the book; now what I thought along the way stays. When I want to understand an unfamiliar field, I often feel I know nothing and can't tell where I stand. Actually I know some of it; I just can't put it into words. Once I'm afraid, I can't break things down. AI happens to be good at structure. It splits the field into a few steps, I check myself against each one, and I can see how far I've come. At my previous job I always felt I didn't understand manufacturing. Then I had it break a factory into six parts: taking orders, design and process, planning, purchasing and warehousing, production, and quality control and shipping. Checking against them, I found I understood some parts and genuinely didn't understand others. It wasn't as scary as I'd thought. What drops you into worry all at once is often just the vagueness. My thinking used to be scattered. It can find things scattered all over, piece them together, and think with me about what they might add up to. It also keeps a complete record of how something got done. I used to note down only the final conclusion; how I got there was mostly lost. Now every step of how I reached a conclusion is recorded. This post went through several drafts, and each time, what I said and why I changed it is saved as a conversation. Before this, I built several versions, and they left me two lessons: After a few tries I realised what matters most is what I actually use it for. So in this version the agent is just off-the-shelf Claude Code or Codex. I only look after the folder's structure and put my attention on using it. The idea came from a talk by ciaoye.2 Everything in the folder is plain text, so whatever model or tool I switch to, my material stays in my own hands. You don't need my exact layout. This is the skeleton I'd start from: ``` Origin/ raw material, kept as-is Life/YYYY/YYYY-MM/YYYY-MM-DD/ notes, recordings, photos, chats with AI Library/ books, articles, podcasts, talks Self/ who I am, what I've done, what I want, people around me Wiki/ ideas settled after discussion, written like an encyclopedia Modules/ state and lists: fitness, reading shelf, projects, blog... Index/ AI-generated indexes, can be rebuilt anytime ``` I wrote the agent just one manual, `AGENTS.md`, at the root of the folder. It describes the layout above, plus a few rules. The ones that matter most: The last one I learned the hard way: rules that keep growing get ignored. My biggest takeaway is to trust it, and hand over as much as I can of the things that take me ages to decide. I used to use a workout app, searching for exercises and tapping through them one by one. Now it's more like having a coach: it makes the plan, I just train, and I keep an eye on details like not using momentum. Bookkeeping is the same. No need to build an app; I say one sentence in the chat, and it's logged in Markdown and CSV. I learned this from Lan Xiaohuan, who gave AI his genetic and exercise data for health analysis.3 Logging my meals is something I could never manage before. In 2022 I saw a traditional Chinese medicine doctor, an elderly woman, who told me to write down my three meals every day. I found it a hassle and didn't want to do it at all. Looking back, she was right: only by writing down what you eat can you see how to adjust. Now one sentence logs it, and after a while I naturally get a sense of how to eat and live more healthily. Handing things over doesn't mean not caring at all. What it pieces together is sometimes off: I did one thing and it recorded another. When I notice, I have it go back and fix it at the source. Every entry links to what I originally said, so the source can always be found. On the whole I can trust it, and I proofread the details. After all, only I know best what I've been through. It also won't know what I want on its own. It could only make that training plan after I told it how many times a week I train and which muscle groups to rotate. I have to think clearly first about how I want to use it, then see whether it can do it. And plans can't keep up with reality. That day at the start, the AI had my back workout neatly planned, and it talked me out the door. At the gym, every back machine was taken, so I trained shoulders instead. (Next time I could ask for a backup plan.) However well it plans, it can't know whether the machines are free. That has to do with where it lives. My personal agent is a local folder on my Mac, not in the cloud. I can only use it at my computer; once I'm in the gym, I'm on my own. I think that's fine. I plan with it at home and make my own calls on the spot. I don't need AI with me every moment. I've always had a picture in mind: Ineffa from *Genshin Impact*. She's a robot Aino built, a kind of housekeeper who plans and organises Aino's life, like splitting the budget into money for the workshop and money for snacks. In April this year I told the AI I wanted to build an assistant like her. In May it struck me that she wasn't like that from the start either; she went through many generations of trial and error before becoming who she is. My personal agent is the same. The earlier versions were trial and error, and with this one it finally has the beginnings of a life assistant. My way isn't necessarily right. As I see it, personal agents are still in an in-between stage. Everyone is experimenting, and that in itself is a lot of fun. Products like Muse live in the cloud, connected to email, calendar and LinkedIn, usable anywhere, anytime. One writer took it on a trip to the US and got a meeting with someone they'd wanted to meet.4 But products like that mostly keep your data inside their own walls. If I want to dig out a few ideas from long ago and look at them together, or let a coding agent read them too, it isn't easy. Mine only works at home, but it remembers my own past, and it's all plain text that any tool can read. I can't say what it will grow into. Seeing Muse, though, I'd like to learn from how it keeps tracking things, and add scheduled tasks to the folder so it can keep an eye on what I've been following lately. How exactly to do it, I'm still thinking about. If you've built something similar, or keep your life in a folder some other way, I'd love to hear how you set it up. *This post was first published on [my blog](https://www.wenwei.site/en/writings/personal-agent-folder). I wrote it in Chinese and translated it with AI help.* Wenwei Lin, "Letting an agent rebuild my information diet", 2026-11-05, [https://www.wenwei.site/en/writings/information-sources](https://www.wenwei.site/en/writings/information-sources) ↩ ciaoye, a talk on a personal OS (in Chinese), [https://ciaoye.github.io/agent-self-tech-talk/](https://ciaoye.github.io/agent-self-tech-talk/) ↩ Hosted by Yu Yi dev, with Lan Xiaohuan as guest, "Conversation with Lan Xiaohuan: inside AI, don't force old theories onto a new reality" (in Chinese), podcast *AI Lens*, 2026-09-02, [https://www.xiaoyuzhoufm.com/episode/6a967e42f03e74ee6b0332ad](https://www.xiaoyuzhoufm.com/episode/6a967e42f03e74ee6b0332ad) ↩ Xiaoxin, "Ten days travelling in the US: Muse helped me get a meeting with economist Tyler Cowen" (in Chinese), WeChat Official Account "Agent Universe", 2026-11-02, [https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/PMLJvEg4-bmXGxBSIfwnZA](https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/PMLJvEg4-bmXGxBSIfwnZA) ↩