workbench-bujo

workbench-bujo

BuJo ritual plugin for Claude Code. Part of the claude-workbench marketplace.

What this is

An interactive Bullet Journal system that runs daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly rituals against Apple Notes. Inspired by Ryder Carroll's BuJo method — adapted for a persistent AI collaborator.

Every ritual is interactive: it prompts for reflection, waits for real answers, and processes experiences (not just tasks). Every unfinished or dropped item gets individually inspected — Ryder's "friction of reconsideration" principle, preserved in a digital context. Mid-day, Claude watches for experientially-significant moments and can capture them to today's log on the fly.

Architecture

                      ┌──────────────────────────┐
                      │  /bujo  (or scheduled)   │  ← single entry point
                      └────────────┬─────────────┘
                                   │ spawns
                                   ▼
                      ┌──────────────────────────┐
                      │  bujo-orchestrator       │  ← sub-agent
                      │  • picks tiers by date   │     returns structured plan:
                      │  • scope per tier        │     scope + reflection_focus
                      │  • identifies experiences│     + warnings
                      │  • flags gaps            │
                      └────────────┬─────────────┘
                                   │ plan
                                   ▼
      You  ↔  Hobbes (main)  ◁──── drives interactive ritual protocol
              │                    (check-in, item review, reflection,
              │                     scaffold, planning)
              │
              │   dispatches verbs
              ▼
      ┌───────────────────────┐
      │   bujo-scribe MCP     │   Apple Notes I/O, parser, renderer,
      │                       │   rules.yaml enforcement, backends
      └──────────┬────────────┘
                 │
                 ▼
         📝  Apple Notes
              📓 Journal/

Three layers, three responsibilities:

Layer	Owns
🎯 Orchestrator (sub-agent)	Date math, which tiers run, scope, experience identification, gap detection, warnings
📜 Ritual skills (main conversation)	Interactive protocol — check-in, item-by-item review, reflection, planning
🖋️ bujo-scribe MCP (tool server)	All Apple Notes I/O, BuJo parser/renderer, signifier rules, invariants

Swap backends (Obsidian, plain markdown, Notion, etc.) by adding a new NotebookBackend to the MCP. The interactive ritual protocol doesn't change.

Prerequisites

• workbench-core@claude-workbench — memory vault, session infrastructure, execution-aware learnings
• bujo-scribe-mcp (bundled) — the MCP server the plugin launches for all BuJo storage work
• Scheduled tasks MCP — registers and triggers the ritual schedule
• macOS — the shipping apple_notes backend uses AppleScript via osascript. Other OSes unblocked by adding a new backend.

Installation

1. Install the plugin

Once the marketplace is published (includes workbench-bujo in its manifest):

claude plugin marketplace add mike-bronner/claude-workbench
claude plugin install workbench-bujo@claude-workbench

Currently — pre-publication / local development: the claude-workbench marketplace still references the older bullet-journal name, and workbench-bujo hasn't been added to its manifest yet. Install the plugin locally by pointing Claude Code at your clone:

# Clone if you haven't
git clone https://github.com/mike-bronner/workbench-bujo
cd workbench-bujo

# Install from your local checkout
claude plugin install /absolute/path/to/workbench-bujo

After installation, restart Claude Code so the plugin's agents, skills, commands, and MCP server are picked up.

2. The scribe MCP runs from source — nothing for you to do

Starting with v0.7.0, the scribe MCP source lives in this repo at scribe/ and is launched via uv run --project ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scribe bujo-scribe-mcp serve. No bundled wheel, no auto-install dance — uv resolves dependencies from scribe/pyproject.toml and caches the venv after the first invocation.

Requirements:

• uv must be on PATH (install uv).

What happens on first plugin launch:

1. uv run --project scribe/ ... resolves dependencies and creates a cached venv (~5–10s, one time).
2. Subsequent sessions reuse the cached venv — overhead is ~150–300ms.

Local dev: edit scribe/src/bujo_scribe_mcp/..., restart the session, changes are live. No build step.

3. Run setup

Inside Claude Code:

/workbench-bujo:bujo-setup

Walks configuration, deploys the single scheduled task, offers legacy cleanup.

Commands