founder-os

Founder OS

A Claude Code plugin that gives a company of one — or a founder running several — an executive team: 13 agents, 49 skills, 10 scheduled cadences — strategy, offer, pipeline, delivery, money, focus and the cross-business portfolio, with one markdown workspace per business as shared state and a write-time ownership guard keeping the org from corrupting it.

Free and MIT-licensed. Founder OS runs inside your existing Claude Code environment and adds no account or subscription of its own.

Getting started · Example workspace · All 49 workflows · Product philosophy

This repository is both the plugin marketplace (install straight from it) and the source repo (validator, tests, design docs).

Product philosophy, the org chart, and what the plugin refuses to do: founder-os/README.md. This file covers how the machine works and how to develop against it.

Install

Before installing:

Requirement	Purpose
Recent Claude Code	Founder OS is a plugin, not a standalone app.
Python 3	Runs the ownership hook.
PyYAML	Enables the full ownership-map check; the hook degrades gracefully without it.
cron (optional)	Runs scheduled cadences. Manual workflows do not need it.

The 13 agents are specialized roles invoked when needed, not 13 autonomous processes running all day. Founder OS knows only what is recorded in its local Markdown workspace or supplied in the current session; it does not automatically sync a calendar, CRM, inbox, or bank account.

In Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add msolecki/founder-os
/plugin install founder-os@founder-os

Then, once:

/founder-os-init      # ~20 min onboarding, ends with your first brief
/setup-cadences       # optional: cron entries so it runs without being asked

Scheduled jobs run only while that machine and its cron service are running. See the complete docs/getting-started.md guide before installing if you want the requirements, data boundary, and first-week workflow in one place.

To see the output first, open the fictional but contract-shaped examples/studio-north/ workspace and follow q-0720a from the daily brief into the queue, quarterly bet, week, and review.

How it works

The moving parts

Piece	Where	What it does
Agents	founder-os/agents/*.md	13 role definitions. Frontmatter: name, description, skills[], tools: allowlist (+ Agent(...) edges for managers). Body: four mandated headings.
Skills	founder-os/skills/*/SKILL.md	49 procedures. Role skills follow references/skill-template.md exactly; each declares its writes in metadata.writes.
Ownership map	founder-os/references/ownership.yaml	The single source of truth: workspace_files: (what init scaffolds), owns: (one owner per file), sections: (the headings each file may contain).
Write-time guard	founder-os/hooks/ownership-guard.py	A PreToolUse hook. Denies a subagent writing a file it doesn't own, and denies subagents any outbound-capable tool (Bash, WebFetch, mcp__*). Fails open, main thread always allowed.
Validator	scripts/validate_package.py	14 build-time checks (below). CI runs it on every push.
Cadences	founder-os/skills/setup-cadences/SKILL.md	10 cron lines on your machine calling skills headless — a plugin cannot ship a schedule, so this writes one, with your consent, once per business. Fences are slugged per business (# BEGIN founder-os:<slug>) so two businesses never clobber each other's schedule.
Multi-business	founder-os/references/multi-business.md	One workspace per business + a registry (~/.founder-os/businesses.yaml) + a portfolio workspace. The hook resolves all registered roots; context-load step 0 picks the business before any file opens.
Commands doc	founder-os/COMMANDS.md	Generated by scripts/generate_commands.py from the skills' own frontmatter — the user-facing catalogue, machine-derived so it cannot drift. CI fails if it is stale.

The contract, in one paragraph