A personal knowledge base for ambitious knowledge workers running multiple projects in parallel. Extends Obsidian and Claude to hold your work, keep the racing lines clean between projects, and make your voice carry across everything you ship.
Lauda is the voice in your ear during every stint and the engineer who takes the car apart after. He saves what you decided yesterday, keeps the lines between your projects clean, and calls the warning before you drift into the gravel. He proposes, you commit. He tells you the truth, even when the truth is that you were wrong on the last lap.
A starter template (a folder, a few CLAUDE.md files, a small pile of scripts) that turns a directory into a single, coherent workspace for a person running several long-running projects with Claude as a working partner.
You clone it, open it in Cowork or Claude Code, type Hello wizard,
answer a handful of questions, and you have a working vault. After that,
the daily loop is: you work, Claude helps, the system keeps the context
clean.
You need one AI runtime. Either works:
- Cowork (Claude desktop app, currently in research preview). Good if you want a chat-first experience and don't live in a terminal.
- Claude Code CLI. Good if you already work in a terminal and want tight coupling to git and shell tools.
Obsidian is optional but recommended. The vault is plain Markdown in a folder, so Obsidian reads it natively. You get a graph view, backlinks, and search for free. Install it from obsidian.md and "Open folder as vault" pointed at your cloned Lauda OS folder.
Git is recommended but optional. Lauda OS ships as a GitHub template
repo, so the obvious path is gh repo create to start your vault. If you
don't use git, you can download the ZIP and unpack it anywhere.
Time budget. The setup wizard takes about five to ten minutes end to end. Pour a coffee first. The wizard asks short questions, confirms once, scaffolds the vault, and archives itself. You should have a working vault before the cup cools.
- Clone or download this repo into a folder on your computer.
- Open Cowork. "Create a new project" then "Use an existing folder" and
point it at your cloned
lauda-os/folder. - In the chat, type:
Hello wizard - Answer the wizard's questions.
# clone the template
gh repo create my-vault --template theDoc001/lauda-os --private --clone
cd my-vault
# start a session
claude
# inside the session, trigger the wizard
Hello wizardEither route ends with the wizard scaffolding your vault and archiving
itself. Open system/MANUAL.md to learn the daily loop.
Four ideas do most of the work.
-
Pushed context beats triggered tools. Every folder with work in it has a
CLAUDE.mdthat tells Claude what matters there. The root CLAUDE.md links down into project-level ones. Claude never needs to be asked to "read the docs" because the context is already there when the session starts. (Context from the Vercel AI evals: MCP-trigger retrieval fails around 56% of the time. Pushed context doesn't miss.) -
Three agents, three cadences. Each runs on its own rhythm. They propose, you commit. No agent autonomously changes principles, priorities, or root files.
- Engineer (daily): your working partner for the day. Picks up the last handover, flags what is stale, drafts the next move.
- Scrutineer (weekly): audits the system. Checks CLAUDE.md health, tag hygiene, folder drift. Files a proposal, never rewrites.
- Principal (monthly): steps back. Reviews direction, scans online topics you follow, flags shifts in the landscape worth noticing.
-
Archive, never delete. Everything retired moves to
archive/with a timestamp. Nothing is ever gone. -
Obsidian is the graph. Use Obsidian for navigation, backlinks, and search. Claude reads the same files. They don't compete.
That is the system. Everything in system/MANUAL.md is detail on top.
Knowledge workers running more than one long-running project (side projects, client work, a thesis, a company, a public presence). People who already use Claude in some form and want the vault to give Claude durable context instead of re-explaining every session. People who like Obsidian but don't want to live inside it. People who want a system that gets out of their way between pit stops.
It is not for teams of more than a few people editing the same vault (works, but expect rough edges), anyone who wants a hosted polished app (this is plain Markdown in a folder), or anyone who wants agents to write autonomously (Lauda OS is propose-never-commit by design).
| System | Graph | Agents | Pushed context | Local-first | Propose-never-commit | Template |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Notion AI | no | no | no | no | no | no |
| Obsidian + community plugins | yes | partial | no | yes | varies | yes |
| Claude Projects | no | no | yes (one layer) | no | n/a | no |
| Mem.ai | yes | yes | partial | no | no | no |
| Roam / Logseq | yes | no | no | yes | n/a | partial |
| Tana | yes | partial | no | no | n/a | no |
| Raw Custom Instructions | no | no | yes | n/a | n/a | no |
| Lauda OS | yes (via Obsidian) | yes (3, cadenced) | yes (multi-level chain) | yes | yes | yes |
your-vault/
├── CLAUDE.md # operating root (written by the wizard)
├── README.md # this file
├── LICENSE · NOTICE · CHANGELOG.md
├── .claude/settings.json # hook wiring for session archive
├── docs/ # deeper docs: setup, architecture, comparison
├── projects/ # where work happens
├── personal/ # principles, priorities, voice, backlog
├── system/
│ ├── MANUAL.md # user-facing guide
│ ├── conventions.md # naming, tags, writing style
│ ├── redactions.txt # PreCompact hook redactions
│ ├── check.sh # vault health check
│ ├── agents/ # scrutineer, engineer, principal, pending-decisions
│ ├── hooks/ # pre-compact.sh session archiver
│ └── chat-archive/ # YYYY-MM/{timestamp}-session.md
└── archive/ # retired files (never deleted)
Built, not pitched. The aim is to make a Claude-assisted workspace feel like a decent car: predictable, honest about what it can do, quiet between corners. No hype, no agent swarms writing over your principles, no "AI-first" packaging. A folder, some files, a set of agreements about what gets written where.
The three locked rules:
- Propose, never commit. Agents draft. You decide.
- Archive, never delete. Reversibility is cheap. Certainty isn't.
- Keep the racing lines clean. One owner per file, clear firewalls, honest tags.
Lauda OS takes its vocabulary from racing culture and heritage. It is an independent open-source project, not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any motorsport team, or trademarked entity. No photographs, logos, or registered marks of any third party are used, and none should be inferred.
Issues and pull requests welcome. Before opening either, skim docs/architecture.md to make sure your proposal fits the design principles. Things that lean toward autonomous-commit, required sign-in, or hosted state will be closed.
Apache 2.0. See LICENSE and NOTICE.
Early. MVP scaffolding in place. Expect sharp edges. Feedback welcome.