second-brain-starter-kit

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A starter kit for running Claude Code as a second brain + working assistant, from Palo Alto AI Research Lab. This is the system we run ourselves every day — stripped of personal data and cut down to a portable core: the method, not the data.

Why take the whole thing, not one skill

A single skill is a trick. What makes an agent useful over months is the set of habits around it: a gate that refuses to say "done" without evidence, a retrospective that files what you learned where the next session will actually find it, a registry of decisions you already rejected so nobody re-pitches them, a handoff that survives a crash. Those only work together, which is why they ship as one kit rather than as 100 separate downloads.

Install it whole and you get a working second brain on day one:

It is MIT, it costs nothing, and nothing here phones home. Take what you need, delete the rest, and open an issue if a skill breaks on your machine. Paths are documented in docs/PATHS.md.

Onboarding a whole machine

Setting up a brand-new computer, not just adding skills? There is a full runbook a fresh Claude Code session can execute end to end — the human says one sentence, the agent does the rest:

• macOS → ONBOARDING-MAC.md
• Windows → ONBOARDING-WINDOWS.md
• joining an existing fleet as a trusted family node (sync, shared memory, message bus) →