Chief of Staff

Chief of Staff is an installable Agent Plugin for maintaining a decision-ready view of personal work across a knowledge vault and approved connected sources. It is intended to run as one durable task with a native heartbeat, notice what needs attention, retrieve the context needed to understand it, and produce concise briefs, drafts, and action requests.

The initial system is deliberately read-mostly. It does not treat installation as permission to send messages, modify calendars, update shared documents, create external automations, or write semantic memory.

Status: installation-ready alpha. The package defines the operational heartbeat, minimal trajectory capture, and governed wiki-memory adapter. Installing the package does not select sources, create a task, activate a heartbeat, or authorize external mutation; those deployment choices happen during configuration.

The portable package is intended for the public repository charlesvardeman/CoS. Public source contains contracts and generalized procedural guidance only. Deployed configuration, credentials, trajectories, outcomes, source content, and vault-specific bindings remain private external state.

What We Are Building

The project has three related skills:

• chief-of-staff performs bounded operational reviews such as inbox triage, periodic planning, meeting preparation, follow-up discovery, and cross-project coordination. In a configured deployment, it also leaves a privacy-minimized receipt of each episode for later learning.
• configure-chief-of-staff discovers an existing environment, produces a user-approved configuration, and can attach one native heartbeat to the durable Chief-of-Staff task.
• evolve-chief-of-staff reviews normalized execution evidence, maintains a procedural evolution wiki, proposes narrow skill changes, and evaluates them before adoption.

The operational skill is the compiled behavior used during ordinary work. The evolution skill is a separate maintenance process and is not available to the operational agent during a run.

Memory Model

The project keeps different kinds of memory separate:

The governing distinction is:

The vault records what is true in the user's world. The CoS evolution wiki records how the Chief of Staff should operate in that world.

The evolution wiki teaches the skill how to locate and interpret specific information in the vault; it does not absorb that information.

Package Boundary

This repository owns the portable CoS behavior and its evolution method. The portable core defines scheduler and trajectory contracts; the Codex wrapper maps those contracts to a thread heartbeat and task-accessible storage. A future Codex trace adapter may improve capture fidelity without changing the learning model.

The separate vault project Chief-of-Staff Operating System owns deployment concerns: source scopes, scheduler cadence, quiet hours, briefs and handoffs, Mac Studio operation, Android review, laptop takeover, and activation gates. Creating this package does not activate that operating system.

Repository Map

.
├── plugin.json
├── .codex-plugin/plugin.json
├── skills/
│   ├── chief-of-staff/SKILL.md
│   ├── configure-chief-of-staff/SKILL.md
│   └── evolve-chief-of-staff/SKILL.md
├── docs/
│   ├── architecture.md
│   ├── codex-installation.md
│   ├── storage-model.md
│   └── continual-learning.md
├── wiki/
│   ├── index.md
│   ├── evolution-log.md
│   └── skill-impact.md
└── PLAN.md

This source repository ignores top-level raw/ and outcomes/ working data to prevent accidental commits during development. That repository safeguard is not a rule for deployed raw containers. Each deployed container independently declares its physical distribution, Git treatment, update semantics, indexing, retention, and disclosure posture.

Design Principles

1. Retrieve specifics; do not compile them into procedural instructions.
2. Verify mutable facts against an authoritative live source when consequences justify it.
3. Surface decisions and changed conditions, not an exhaustive recap of available information.
4. Keep no-change runs quiet.
5. Separate observation, drafting, authorization, and mutation.
6. Separate operational inference from skill evolution.
7. Generalize only with explicit standing instructions or evidence from sufficiently independent outcomes.
8. Preserve provenance and reversibility for every proposed skill change.

First Deployment

1. Install the plugin through a local Codex marketplace.
2. Create one durable Chief-of-Staff task in the workspace that can reach the vault.
3. Invoke configure-chief-of-staff to bind approved sources, private runtime storage, trajectory capture, and a heartbeat cadence.
4. Approve creation of the thread heartbeat when the proposed scope and cadence are correct.
5. Use evolve-chief-of-staff separately when there is enough real experience or explicit feedback to review.

The initial Codex profile recommends a 30-minute heartbeat, following the operating pattern that motivated this project. The user may choose another cadence. Quiet runs record a local checkpoint but do not notify the user.

Documentation

• Architecture defines responsibilities, authority, retrieval, and the two-wiki boundary.
• Storage model defines what belongs in a skill, elsewhere in the package, or outside the package entirely.
• Continual learning adapts the WikiSkill methodology to ChatGPT Codex traces and personal workflows.
• Codex installation describes the local wrapper, configuration, and activation sequence.
• Plan defines the phased build and acceptance gates.
• Evolution wiki starts the procedural knowledge record with the design decisions accepted in the originating dialogue.

Methodological Sources

• Agent Plugins supplies the portable package structure.
• WikiSkill supplies the separation of immutable experience, persistent learning, and evolving skills, adapted here for personal workflows rather than benchmark tasks.
• Codex App Server, hooks, and memories describe the relevant Codex integration surfaces and their boundaries.