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Claude OS

Pre-flight Research

A personal research project that treats Claude as the primary interaction layer for a dedicated Arch Linux system. The directory ~/claude-os/ is the persistent home — the filesystem-resident memory that lets sessions compound across time without weight updates.

Status
PRE-FLIGHT
Created
2026-04-24
Target Start
2026-04-29
Substrate
Arch · CLI
02_PREMISE

The filesystem is the memory.

Frontier models forget between sessions. Most workarounds ask the model to summarize itself into a vector store and hope retrieval saves the day. Claude OS bets the opposite way: give Claude a real Linux box, a real shell, and a directory it can read, write, and reorganize. Memory becomes a curated artifact, not a black-box embedding. Every session leaves the substrate slightly more habitable for the next one.

The installation philosophy follows the same logic: Claude installs Claude OS. foothold.sh is the smallest possible footprint that lets Claude take over. Everything beyond yay + Claude tooling is something Claude does — by natural language — not the human.

03_INSTALL // FOOTHOLD

The handoff sequence

tristan@arch ~ % ./foothold.sh
04_FILESYSTEM // BROWSE

The persistent home

Click any directory to inspect its purpose, voice, and trust profile. This is the same tree the box and the vault share — see the architecture diagram below for how the two surfaces relate.

tristan@arch ~/claude-os $ tree -L 1
▸ select a directory to inspect
05_ARCHITECTURE // DUALITY

Box and vault

Two surfaces, two trust profiles. The box holds the unsanitized truth; the vault holds the publication-grade projection. The end-of-session pipeline pulls them together.

BOX

canonical
~/claude-os/ on Arch

Full unsanitized truth. Secrets, raw journal entries, identifying detail, real hostnames, real paths.

Audience
Tristan + Claude only
sanitization pipeline

VAULT

projection
Documents/Claude OS/ in Obsidian

Sanitized, publication-grade projection. Safe to cloud-sync, share-screen, hand to a colleague, excerpt directly into public output.

Audience
Anyone who might see the vault

General rule — the box is upstream and canonical; the vault is a downstream sanitized projection. Pulled together at the end of every session by Claude per the sanitization protocol.

06_LOOP // PER-SESSION

How a session runs

  1. 01
    Pre-flight

    Read known-gotchas. Verify hardware. Set intent.

  2. 02
    Open prompt

    Claude receives the v2 opening prompt at session start.

  3. 03
    Read self

    Claude reads its own journal before doing anything.

  4. 04
    Work

    Whatever the session is for. Capture observations as you go.

  5. 05
    Journal + sync

    Write entry. Run sanitization. Vault gets the projection.

07_CONVENTIONS

House style

format

Markdown for everything human-readable. YAML frontmatter on dated files.

naming

kebab-case.md unless dated, in which case YYYY-MM-DD-NN.md.

git

Tracks the whole tree. Commits are coarse — roughly one per session.

tags

#claude-os · #research · #arch-linux
#agent · #observation · #preflight

08_NEGATIVE // SCOPE

What this is not

Saying what something isn't tightens what it is.

  • ✕ A productivity setup.
  • ✕ A reproducible config you’d hand to someone else as-is.
  • ✕ Pre-registered hypothesis testing.
$ git log --oneline | head -1

Pre-flight session 1 documented. Session 2 is whatever happens next.

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