cothought

Cothought

A Claude Code plugin that turns a plain markdown folder into a thinking system. You journal by voice, and the AI captures your words verbatim, links ideas into a zettelkasten note network, and maintains a living self-model called the metamap. Over time, it builds a picture of who you are, what you're working through, and what patterns keep showing up. Then it uses that picture to ask better questions.

The name is a nod to the ancient hypomnema (ὑπόμνημα, hype-OM-neh-mah), personal notebooks the Stoics and Epicureans kept for self-examination. They compiled fragments from readings, conversations, and daily life into a structured tool for self-formation. Foucault described them as capturing "the already said, to collect what one has managed to hear or read, and for a purpose that is nothing less than the shaping of the self." Marcus Aurelius kept one. Seneca kept one. This is the version where the notebook thinks back.

Wikipedia: Hypomnema · Foucault: "Self Writing"

Quick start

In Claude Code, run /plugins and add a custom marketplace with the URL elliotbonneville/claude-cothought. Then install the cothought plugin from that marketplace.

Then run /cothought:setup to create your config. It asks where your notes live, helps you pick a voice dictation tool, and you're done. Run /cothought:journal to start your first session.

All skills are prefixed with cothought: since they come from the plugin. You invoke them as /cothought:journal, /cothought:review, etc.

What's in the box

Eight skills that work together:

• /cothought:journal — Voice-to-text capture with verbatim transcription. Two-zone format: conversation above the line, reflections below. Updates the metamap every session.
• /cothought:zettelkasten — Brainstorming and research companion. Creates and links notes with claim-based titles, history tables, back-links. Three note types (concept, reference, structure). Validates all links.
• /cothought:review — Weekly synthesis across journal entries and the note network. Follows links, reads history tables, surfaces patterns, checks progress on configurable life foundations.
• /cothought:project — Captures and researches a project idea into a zettelkasten note with web research and network connections.
• /cothought:begin-project — Spins up a GitHub repo from a project idea note, pulling related zettelkasten context into the repo's docs.
• /cothought:voice — Writing quality skill. Fights AI voice at the architectural level: vocabulary, structure, rhythm, density, subtext. Load alongside other skills when the output needs to sound human.
• /cothought:setup — Interactive first-run configuration. Creates your config file and optionally seeds your notes directory.
• /cothought:write-vision — Guided exercise for creating aspirational "example day" passages that ground the whole system.

The metamap

The most distinctive piece. A living self-model stored in metamap.md that the journal skill updates every session. It draws on research from narrative therapy, CBT, IFS, and reflective practice to maintain a structured picture of who you are right now. It tracks:

• Who you are right now — one paragraph, updated constantly. Includes a "chapter title" (from Dan McAdams' narrative identity research).
• Dominant stories & counter-evidence — the things you believe about yourself ("I never finish anything") alongside dated evidence for and against. Over time, the counter-evidence loosens the story's grip. This is the therapeutic core, drawn from Michael White's narrative therapy.
• Pattern map — recurring trigger → thought → feeling → behavior chains (CBT-style). Both destructive loops and positive ones.
• Breakthroughs & experiments — insights paired with whether they were tested and what happened. Reflection without experimentation is rumination.
• Active threads, commitments, open questions, relationships, physical state correlations.

Research foundations are documented in docs/metamap-research.md.

Config

All skills read ~/.claude/cothought.json at invocation. Run /cothought:setup to create this interactively, or copy and edit the example:

cp cothought.example.json ~/.claude/cothought.json

The only required field is notes_dir. Everything else is optional and can be added later — either through /cothought:setup advanced or by skills that onboard their own config on first use (e.g., /cothought:begin-project asks for your dev directory the first time you use it).

{
  "notes_dir": "/path/to/your/notes/",
  "reference_files": {
    "vision": "vision/main.md",
    "plan": "90-day-plan.md"
  }
}

See cothought.example.json for a full config with all options.

How skills connect

The skills reference each other and form a coherent system: