The goals system

I wanted my AI to actually know me, rather than just remembering the last few messages of a conversation. So I built what I call Telos, adapted from an idea in Daniel Miessler's PAI project - a structured model of who I am and what I am trying to do. Plenty of people write their goals down. The difference here is that the system also watches what I actually did with my month, and tells me about it.

What goes in.

• A vault sweep. The first draft came from pointing Claude at years of my own essays, journals and notes and asking it to assemble who I am from what I had already written, so it was sourced rather than aspirational.
• An interview. Claude asked, I talked, and the transcript got distilled. It filled in everything I had never written down because nobody had asked.
• A continuous dictation log. Any self-reflective thought, straight from my phone, appending without approval, because friction on capture kills capture.
• A quarterly revealed-action pass. What I actually did rather than what I said - where the calendar time went, which tasks I finished and which I quietly killed. This is the route built to catch self-deception.
• The conversations themselves. Working a decision through the system surfaces patterns in how I decide that were never in any file, and those get proposed back to me.

The files. A collection of files covering me (my identity, my relationships, my beliefs and models, my strengths and weaknesses), my purpose (my mission, my goals, my strategies) and my learnings. Each goal feeds a mission and each strategy feeds a goal, so a strategy serving no goal is visible at a glance. Behind every summary file sits a raw log - near-verbatim, dated, never edited after landing. Logs append without my approval, but nothing reaches a summary without it. Claude may suggest additions to my missions, goals and the rest, though nothing lands without being run past me first.

What comes back out.

• Claude reads the summaries at the beginning of every session that touches my own work, which means it catches me at my known failure points. If I am refining a model because the modelling is fun, it tells me to stop refining and go and test the thing in the real world.
• It reads my task system back as evidence - what I opened, what I finished and what I quietly killed - tested against what I said I was trying to do.
• Every month it pushes me a review of how I have actually spent my time against my strategies (which feed my goals), essentially an audit of what is quietly being swept under the rug. It arrives already written, findings and proposed edits included, so I only have to rule on it.
• Coaching on demand, for decisions big and small. It reads the relevant raw logs and not just the summaries, and I can combine it with the consultants I have built on specific corpuses - the LessWrong one makes the Sequences available as a personal life coach equipped with a deep psychoanalysis of my brain. Every session writes a record, and the review reads those first, hunting for one pattern in particular, which goes something like "you have brought me this decision three times in two months and still not made it".

I wrote separately about what it means to wire an AI into the authoring of your own goals, and where I think the limits are, in The Extended Self.