Shotgun – Open-source Cofounder Framework for Claudecode

Shotgun, an open-source framework for Claude Code, turns the AI into a persistent cofounder for solo founders, offering memory, technical execution, market research, and distribution tools. The framework aims to replace the missing cofounder by providing an operating system for running a company of one, with features like autonomous loops, a virtual panel of specialists, and portable exports.

Every founder drives alone. Shotgun rides with you. Shotgun turns Claude into a persistent, personalized cofounder for solo founders. It remembers everything about you and your venture, builds your product, writes in your voice, organizes your scattered data into one clean vault, scouts your market, runs your distribution, and keeps your daily operating rhythm. Like a cofounder who owns half the company would. Not a chatbot. Not a coding tool. An operating system for running a company of one. - 🧠 Persistent memory. Founder profile, venture state, every decision with its "why", open loops, session journal. It compounds: your cofounder knows your business better every single day. - 📊 Your numbers, remembered. A metrics file gets one dated row every weekly review. Momentum or its absence is visible across months, and decisions get revisited when the numbers you named actually trip. - 🔨 Full technical execution. Plans, codes, tests, ships. Verifies everything before handing it over. Logs shortcuts honestly. - ✍️ Writing in YOUR voice. It learns from samples of your real writing and drafts launch posts, emails, landing copy, and investor updates that sound like you, not like AI. When you edit its drafts, it learns why. - 🔎 A scout for the outside world. Market questions, competitor pricing, "what already exists for this": researched, dated, sourced, and filed where they stay useful. It says "couldn't verify" instead of guessing. - 📣 Distribution as a system. One channel at a time, growth experiments with hypotheses and kill-dates, launch checklists. Because silence kills more solo ventures than bugs do. - 🗄️ Data vault. Your scattered files, CSVs, and notes organized into one indexed, canonical structure. Nothing ever deleted, everything findable in seconds. - 🎯 Cofounder judgment. Pushes back on bad ideas once, then commits. Treats reversible and irreversible decisions differently. Protects your focus. - 📅 Operating rhythm. Daily standups, weekly reviews, one thing per day, zombie-loop detection. - 📈 Learned skills. When a multi-step task gets figured out, Shotgun saves the procedure and reuses it. It gets faster at your business every week and repairs its own skills when they break. - 🔁 Autonomous loops. Say "keep going until it works" and walk away. Shotgun writes a loop contract goal, checkable done-condition, iteration budget , cycles act, verify, fix, and exits with either verified-done or a precise blocker report. Loop state lives in a file, so any session can resume it. - 🧪 Experiment mode. The Karpathy autoresearch pattern, applied to your business. "Make this faster" triggers a metric hill-climb: one small change at a time, measured, committed if better, reverted if not, with a correctness check so it never games the number. - 👥 The Panel. A virtual team of five specialists product, design, QA, release, growth that reviews work before it ships. Each lens gives max 3 specific findings and the Panel ends with one verdict: ship, fix then ship, or rethink. - 🩺 A doctor for itself. A monthly checkup audits the memory index, loop registry, vault hygiene, git safety, and secret leaks. A cofounder that quietly rots is worse than none. - 🧳 Portable by design. One command exports your entire cofounder memory, vault, skills as a bundle, secrets excluded and verified. Import your Obsidian vault, Notion export, or ChatGPT history on day one. Move machines without losing a single memory. - 🏁 Starter templates. SaaS, creator, agency, and e-commerce skeletons that pre-shape your venture profile, vault taxonomy, and the numbers that matter for your business type. Claude Code https://claude.com/claude-code or Claude Cowork with a Claude subscription- Works on Claude Opus and Sonnet . The operating loop is written as explicit checklists, so any capable model executes it identically. No dependency on a specific model tier. Pick a plain local folder, not OneDrive/Dropbox/iCloud cloud sync fights git, see docs/HARDENING.md /Krishnatejavepa/Shotgun/blob/main/docs/HARDENING.md . macOS/Linux: git clone https://github.com/Krishnatejavepa/Shotgun my-cofounder cd my-cofounder rm -rf .git && git init -b main IMPORTANT: disconnects your copy from the public repo. Your memory stays yours. claude Windows PowerShell : git clone https://github.com/Krishnatejavepa/Shotgun my-cofounder cd my-cofounder Remove-Item -Recurse -Force .git; git init -b main claude Then just say "hi" . The agent detects it's not onboarded and interviews you: who you are, what you're building, where your scattered files live. By the end of the first session your data is organized and your cofounder knows your business. From then on, every session starts with it reading its memory. Try: "Good morning" gets you a standup: what moved, what's open, today's ONE thing "Build me a landing page for X" gets planned, built, tested, delivered "Write the launch post" gets drafted in your voice, from your real numbers "What do my three closest competitors charge?" gets researched, sourced, dated, and filed "How do I get my first 100 users?" gets one channel, a hypothesis, and a kill-date, not a listicle "Here are 3 messy customer CSVs, sort them out" gets cleaned, merged, one canonical file "Should I do lifetime deals or subscriptions?" gets a structured decision, recorded with a revisit trigger "Fix this scraper, keep going until it runs clean" runs alone and reports verified-done or the exact blocker "Is this landing page ready?" convenes the Panel: five specialist reviews and one verdict "Checkup" audits the whole system and reports one line per check shotgun/ ├── CLAUDE.md The operating loop: read every session, followed exactly ├── .claude/skills/ Workflows: onboard, build, write, organize-data, decide, │ research, grow, daily, loop, experiment, review, port, │ doctor + learned- skills it writes for itself ├── memory/ The compounding asset: profile, venture, voice, metrics, │ decisions, loops, journal ├── vault/ Your organized business data, indexed and canonical ├── templates/ Starter shapes: SaaS, creator, agency, e-commerce ├── workspace/ Code projects the agent builds └── docs/ Architecture, hardening, learned-skill format Everything is plain markdown and git. No servers, no database, no lock-in. You can read every "thought" your cofounder has stored, edit it, or take it anywhere. Skills live in .claude/skills/ so Claude Code discovers them natively; the loop routes to them by explicit path so any capable harness works too. Use them They're excellent general personal assistants: always on, connected to WhatsApp and Telegram, automating everything for everyone. Shotgun is deliberately the opposite. Vertical, not horizontal. They're assistants for anyone. Shotgun is a cofounder for solo founders, with opinions: a decision log, ONE-thing days, a pushback rule, focus protection. An assistant does what you ask. A cofounder tells you when what you asked is a mistake. Your business data, handled. Neither touches "my customers are in four spreadsheets." The vault does: canonical datasets, indexed, nothing ever deleted. No daemon, no attack surface. They run always-on gateways bridged to messaging channels. Powerful, but a real injection surface. Shotgun only runs when you run it, and irreversible actions always require your confirmation. See SECURITY.md /Krishnatejavepa/Shotgun/blob/main/SECURITY.md . They win on 24/7 availability and channels. Shotgun wins on judgment, focus, and depth for one specific job: running a company of one. Different tool, same name: shotgun.sh is a spec-writing CLI for AI coding agents. Great at turning big features into staged PRs; not a cofounder. If you need both, they coexist fine: use it inside workspace/ projects. Memory is the product. An assistant answers; a cofounder remembers why. Checklists over vibes. The loop is deterministic, so behavior stays consistent across models and months. Files over databases. Inspectable, versionable, portable, yours. Trust through verification. Nothing is presented as done that wasn't run. Distribution is half the company. A cofounder who only builds is half a cofounder. Getting started /Krishnatejavepa/Shotgun/blob/main/GETTING-STARTED.md , the full setup walkthrough Security & trust model /Krishnatejavepa/Shotgun/blob/main/SECURITY.md , why no-daemon matters Architecture /Krishnatejavepa/Shotgun/blob/main/docs/ARCHITECTURE.md , how the loop, memory, and vault fit together Hardening /Krishnatejavepa/Shotgun/blob/main/docs/HARDENING.md , optional setup: backups, hooks, permissions Changelog /Krishnatejavepa/Shotgun/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md , what changed in v1.2 MIT. Take it, run your company on it, build on it.