TARS
TARS turns a local Markdown workspace into a persistent Claude assistant for meetings, memory, tasks, briefings, strategic thinking, and stakeholder communication.
TARS is built around a few core ideas:
- The local Markdown workspace is the data model. Obsidian is optional and can be enabled later as a visual browser.
- The local TARS helper (
tars-vault) is the required guardrail layer for workspace writes. It ships with the plugin and runs locally.
- The AI harness is treated as product code: lean always-loaded instructions, mode-specific references, hooks, validators, and review-gated improvements.
- TARS-managed notes use schema-validated
tars- frontmatter properties.
- Live Obsidian Bases are available in Obsidian mode; headless users can query the same files through Claude.
- Retrieval combines SQLite FTS5 over structured memory with a local FastEmbed + sqlite-vec semantic layer over prose (journal, transcripts, contexts).
- Briefing is adaptive by default: daily, weekly, re-entry, sparse-context, and drift-aware orientation all route through
/briefing or natural language.
- Meetings run a nuance-capture pass after summarization — contrarian views, quotes, numbers, unusual terms are preserved verbatim.
- The inbox is a first-class intake path: drop transcripts, PDFs, decks, docs, screenshots, exports, or rough notes into
inbox/pending/ and ask TARS to process the inbox in bulk.
- Integrations are provider-agnostic: skills resolve a capability (calendar, tasks, meeting-recording, data-warehouse, analytics, design, documentation, project-tracker, etc.) and the registry picks the active server.
- Extensions are workspace-installed modules for provider adapters, workflow playbooks, template packs, retrieval packs, and validators; even curated catalog extensions are copied into the user's workspace before use.
- Office output (
.pptx, .docx, .xlsx, .pdf, HTML) delegates to Anthropic's first-party rendering skills; TARS owns content structuring, brand application, companion notes, and workspace filing.
- Tasks and durable memory always go through review before persistence.
- Cold-start friction is addressed by progressive
/welcome, seven onboarding personas, and graceful degradation when integrations are missing.
- Wikilink hygiene is centralized: every
[[…]] flows through format_wikilink; smart-quote and Obsidian-illegal links are rejected at the write side; legacy broken links can be repaired in bulk.
- Startup context is time-aware instead of scan-heavy: a tiny
_system/activity-ledger.yaml capsule tracks last use, intake gaps, stale initiatives, overdue tasks, and active-set pressure.
- Scheduled work is optional and registered through
/welcome --setup-schedules when a scheduler is available. Claude does not run in the background by itself, so weekly staleness, drift, and rollup work is surfaced through scheduled jobs or manual /maintain --weekly.
First run
After installing the plugin, run /welcome. It creates a local Markdown workspace, records your identity and persona, and then guides you into a first paste-or-upload workflow before anything is saved.
/welcome
What you get over time
- Day 1: useful structure from pasted meetings, emails, calls, and docs.
- Day 7: inbox files, memory, people, decisions, and tasks start showing up in
/answer and /briefing.
- Day 30: TARS becomes an operating layer for recurring work, follow-through, and organizational context.
What ships in the framework
The framework ships with 15 skills, 15 slash-command wrappers, note templates, office content outlines, seven personas, live views for Obsidian mode, and deterministic maintenance scripts.
