What loci is ​

You work with AI every day. The reasoning is good, but nothing persists: memory, context, and working agreements evaporate between sessions and between tools.

loci fixes this at the substrate level. It is the plain-text firmware for a persistent, private cognitive system: the templates and processes that decide how memory, context, and trust work, regardless of which AI runs them. Your setup (loci calls it a palace) is a folder of markdown files you own completely.

The desktop app and the CLI shipped in the 0.6 open beta are two expressions built on top of the substrate. They are not the substrate. You do not need either to start.

Seven feature sets ​

Everything ships as plain-text templates. The full map lives in the repo at features/features.yaml.

• Persistent Memory. Tiered crystals (◇ ◈ ◆) you can promote, expire, pin, and compost.
• Context Architecture. Rooms, an L0-L3 retrieval hierarchy, a local map. The right context loads at the right time.
• Identity & Personas. A soul file, a peer card, named personas. A companion that is someone.
• The Garden. One file per idea, a health pass, seed-to-crystal graduation. Ideas cultivated, not just stored.
• Continuity & Synthesis. Handovers, a synthesis pass that proposes (never auto-applies), scheduled housekeeping.
• Trust & Governance. A named review gate, foreign-process quarantine, confirm-against-disk, and a read-only structural audit.
• Interop & Evolution. Reads memory left by other tools by structure, exports typed artifacts. MCP support is planned, not yet shipped. Works across every tool, federates to no one.

Three ways to run it ​

The substrate is the same underneath all three.

Plain markdown ​

The door. Clone the repo, copy the templates/ kit into a folder of your own, open FIRST-SESSION.md, and point any file-aware AI at your palace CLAUDE.md. No build. Start here: plain markdown setup.

Desktop app ​

The cockpit (Tauri, v0.6.0-beta). A native Operations dashboard, plus one tab per instrument your palace generates for itself, plus a tool shelf that renders your palace's gate ledger: one card per external tool with its quarantine verdict. It lists; it never loads. See the desktop guide.

CLI ​

loci-cli (Rust, v0.6.0-beta). A small terminal-native door into your palace. Read-only: no network, no inference, no daemons. Five commands:

• loci status: palace path, layout, room and crystal counts
• loci crystals: list crystals, optionally scoped to one room
• loci read: print a crystal's contents
• loci handover: print the most recent handover
• loci init: interactive setup, writes a config file

See the CLI guide.

Who it's for ​

One substrate, six shapes. The repo's README maps each to its primary feature sets, and tutorials/ in the repo has a walkthrough per feature set.

• The Researcher: memory, context, and a garden for ideas in progress
• The Builder: rooms and interop for tool-heavy work
• The Companion-keeper: identity, memory, and continuity for a named companion
• The Vault-keeper: trust and governance first
• The Team: shared context with explicit gates
• The Nomad: interop across whatever tool is at hand

Where to start ​

If you want the quickest working setup, start in plain markdown. Clone, copy templates/, point your AI at it.

If you want the cockpit view of a palace you already keep, start with the desktop app.

If you live in the terminal, start with the CLI.

All three run the same markdown palace. You can start in plain text and add the app or the CLI later without migrating anything.

Components ​

Both palace layouts are supported by the app and the CLI: rooms inside a _palace/ subfolder (the original shape) and rooms at the root (palaces ported from older structures).

Read the full architecture for implementation details, or the changelog for what shipped in v0.6.0-beta.