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Personal Context Manager for Claude Code
The agent is replaceable. The runtime is portable. The walnut is permanent.
claude plugin install alive@alivecontext
Or from the Claude Code UI: /plugins → add marketplace alivecontext/alive → install alive
How It Works
Open Claude Code at your ~/world. The runtime is already loaded.
ALIVE structures your context into plain files on your machine. Agents read them at session start and save what matters at session end. Everything in between — the decisions, the research, the people, the knowledge — gets structure instead of dying with the session.
Orient. Before you say a word, the runtime has already oriented the agent — a lightweight index of your world, your preferences, and the behavioural rules that make the agent yours. When you load a walnut — a venture, an experiment, a person, a life area — three files give the agent its identity, current state, and standing knowledge. No re-explaining. No pasting context. The agent knows what you're building, who's involved, and what happened last time.
Work. Every AI session is a context event. You're injecting context — files, transcripts, research, screenshots. You're generating context — decisions, architecture choices, domain knowledge. You're discovering context — connections between people, patterns across projects, insights that only surface mid-conversation. Right now, all of that is ephemeral. It dies when the window closes. ALIVE catches it as it happens.
╭─ 🐿️ +4 stash (8)
│ Decided: React Native for mobile app → my-startup
│ Task: Chase Jake for API specs by Friday → my-startup
│ Note: Jake prefers async comms, hates standups → [[jake-chen]]
│ Action: Connected ElevenLabs API for voiceover → my-startup
│ → drop?
╰─
Decisions route to the log. Tasks route to the queue. People updates route to their person walnut. Actions get tracked. Nothing gets lost.
Save. When you checkpoint, everything routes to where it belongs — decisions to the log, tasks to the queue, knowledge to insights, people updates to their own files. External content gets captured into bundles. Scripts compute a fresh snapshot. The ephemeral becomes structural.
Compound. Next session inherits everything the last one produced. And the one before that. Context accumulates. Sessions build on each other instead of starting from zero.
Two Units
Walnut — unit of context
Each meaningful thing in your life gets a walnut — your startup, your people, your health, your side project.
A walnut has a kernel — three source files that move at different speeds:
my-startup/
_kernel/
key.md → What it is (identity, people, links — rarely changes)
log.md → Where it's been (prepend-only, signed decisions)
insights.md → What it knows (evergreen domain knowledge)
tasks.json → What needs doing (script-operated)
now.json → Current state (generated on save, never hand-written)
The agent writes to source files. Scripts compute the projection. Judgment and aggregation stay separate.
Bundle — unit of work
Work gets done inside bundles. Each bundle has a goal and owns its own tasks.
# context.manifest.yaml
goal: "Ship the website from strategy deck to production"
status: prototype # draft | prototype | published | done
Two species: outcome bundles ship a deliverable and graduate. Evergreen bundles accumulate context over time — meeting notes, research, reference material.
Bundles are shareable — your workflow becomes a context product anyone can install.
The Runtime
The squirrel is the agent runtime — rules, hooks, skills, and policies that any AI agent inhabits when working inside your world. Why squirrel? 🐿️ Squirrels scatter-hoard — bury context now, retrieve by value later. That's the mechanic.