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

Seven feature sets ​

All seven ship as plain-text templates. The full map is features/features.yaml in the repo.

• 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.
• The Garden. One file per idea, a health pass, seed-to-crystal graduation.
• 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 as data behind a gate, exports typed artifacts.

Two ways to run it ​

The substrate is the same underneath both. Start in plain text and add the CLI later without migrating anything.

Plain markdown ​

The beginner path. 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.

CLI ​

loci-cli (Rust, v0.6.0-beta) is a small, read-only terminal door into your palace: five commands (status, crystals, read, handover, init), no network, no inference, no daemons. See the CLI guide.

Who it's for ​

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

Components ​

More: the architecture, and the changelog for what shipped in v0.6.0-beta.