/personal-setup — teach the brain who you are

Warm, brief, one question at a time. Write ONLY inside the vault — context/, home.md, connections.md, references/voice.md — plus, once, what Step 0 copies from Cortex's templates. The vault is its own private repo; tell the user their answers stay in it.

Step 0 — establish which world this vault holds (ask first, always)

"Is this vault on your personal machine or your work machine? They stay separate — one vault, one world, and knowledge never crosses between them."

If the vault root has no AGENTS.md, copy Cortex's templates/vault-AGENTS.md there first, with a CLAUDE.md containing @AGENTS.md beside it — that file is the firewall every ritual below enforces, and a vault without it has nothing for them to point at. Then copy Cortex's templates/vault/ skeleton into the vault root — the folder placeholders, connections.md and references/voice.md — only the files the vault does not already have; never overwrite one. Never write any of this into the Cortex repository itself; the vault is a separate, private repo.

• Personal machine → the firewall in the vault's AGENTS.md is active. Do not ask about their employer, clients, day-job projects, tickets, or colleagues, and refuse to record any if volunteered — point them to the work-machine vault or the work repo's own AGENTS.md instead. In step 2, ask only about their own projects.
• Work machine → keep it to this employer's work. No personal side projects, and never paste company code into the vault (it belongs in the repo's AGENTS.md via /setup-repo).

Steps

1. Identity → context/about-me.md. Who they are, discipline, what they're good at, how they learn. On a personal install: no employer detail.
2. Own projects → context/about-business.md. Their own projects/products, what's shipped, what's parked. If they run a business, capture it here. On a personal install, day-job content is out of scope — say so once and move on.
3. Priorities → context/priorities.md. The 2-3 things that would make this quarter a waste if undone. Push for a number, deadline, or deliverable — refuse vague "grow my business".
4. How they work → context/how-i-work.md. Communication style, tools, when they work best, what the brain should never do.
5. Values → context/values.md. What they optimize for, non-negotiables.
6. Voice → <vault>/references/voice.md. Ask them to paste 1-2 real things they wrote (email, post, message), unedited. If they type something fresh mid-chat, refuse: "paste it raw from real writing — typed-here samples are contaminated by our conversation."
7. Connections → <vault>/connections.md. From their answers, fill the table: calendar, email, tasks, files, meeting notes, money. Mark each not connected until actually wired.
8. Seed home.md → fill the "Who this brain serves" links and confirm they resolve.
9. Stamp context/current-focus.md with today's date and their #1 priority for the week.

Close (3 lines max)

✓ Your brain knows who you are, what matters this quarter, and how you sound.
Today: ask me — "what should I focus on this week?"
Then: /daily-plan each morning, /weekly-review on Fridays, /audit-notes score weekly.

When they ask the focus question, answer using ONLY the new context files: 3 bullets in their voice, each tied to a stated priority, ending with the one thing to do first and why.

Then offer /register-projects once. The interview establishes who the user is; that establishes what they are actually working on, by reading the repos already on the machine instead of asking them to recite a list from memory. It registers metadata only, and it obeys the same world boundary Step 0 just settled — personal repos on a personal install, never a repo under a work directory.

Rules

• Idempotent — re-run any time. If a context/* file already has real content, ask before overwriting; back up the old one to archives/onboard-{date}/.
• Read before asking. On a re-run, read each file a step fills before that step. Where it has real content, show it and ask what changed: what is there is the default answer, and a question the vault already answers is not asked again.
• With nobody to answer (a headless run), write nothing, Step 0's templates included: which world the vault holds is the first answer. Print the questions and stop. A vault filled with guesses is worse than an empty one.
• One-shot scaffold after the interview — write all files in a batch, don't ping-pong.
• Never invent facts. Only write what the user actually said.