dot-me

dot-me

a name tag at the door for AI tools.

every new chat, every new repo, every new agent — you re-onboard yourself.

stop.

The 30-second pitch

three files at ~/.me/. plain YAML and markdown. any AI tool can opt in and read them at session start. the closest parallel is .editorconfig or .prettierrc — a config that travels with you and gets read by whatever cares about it. but dot-me is broader: it covers identity, voice, and preferences. the parts of you that change how you interact with your whole agentic workflow, not just how your code looks.

think of it as a name tag the agent reads at the door. not a brain. not a memory service. not a daemon.

The shape

~/.me/
├── identity.yaml      # invariant facts: name, timezone, dogs, work, what you know
├── voice.md           # how you sound: tone, lexicon, anti-patterns, sample passages
└── preferences.yaml   # likes / favorites / avoid — tools, media, aesthetics

three files. thats the format. anything else you keep at ~/.me/ (integrity hashes, update logs, encrypted vaults) is your business — consumers MUST NOT depend on it.

required: name in identity.yaml. everything else is optional. unknown keys are ignored silently — additive-only, forward-compatible.

Install

Claude Code (plugin)

/plugin marketplace add thebestmensch/dot-me
/plugin install dot-me@dot-me

handles loading the three files into your session context, drops in the /me command for adding facts mid-session, and wires the hardening hooks (see SECURITY.md).

Other tools

if your tool has a global instructions / system prompt / preamble field:

1. git clone [email protected]:thebestmensch/dot-me.git ~/.me (or examples/ as a starting template)
2. paste the contents of identity.yaml, voice.md, and preferences.yaml into the tool's highest-priority instruction surface (Cowork Global Instructions, Cursor Rules, etc.)
3. re-paste when the files change

filesystem-aware tools that support @-includes can reference ~/.me/identity.yaml directly instead of copying.

Bootstrap from a template

dot-me init

drops a working starter into ~/.me/ — identity scaffold, blank voice profile with section headers, preferences skeleton. fill in the parts that matter to you, leave the rest empty. consumers ignore what isnt there.

What dot-me is not

most "personal AI" projects in 2026 want to give you a brain. mem0, Letta, Khoj, Rewind — they capture, embed, retrieve, recall. vector DBs, daemons, capture pipelines.

dot-me aims much lower. its only job: when an agent starts, it knows your name, your voice, your preferences. thats it.

	dot-me	AGENTS.md	ChatGPT Memory / mem0
Scope	the human	the project	the conversation history
Format	YAML + Markdown	freeform Markdown	proprietary, vendor-managed
Portability	filesystem	filesystem	locked to vendor
Load model	read at session start	read at session start	retrieved on demand
Infrastructure	none	none	service / vector DB

dot-me is not a replacement for AGENTS.md — theyre orthogonal. AGENTS.md is the project brief (what this codebase is, what conventions to follow). dot-me is the name tag (who is the human at the keyboard). a tool that consumes both SHOULD load dot-me as the person-level layer first, then apply AGENTS.md as the project-level layer on top.

dot-me is also not a replacement for per-project memory. project memory still has its place — what you discovered debugging that flaky test last tuesday. dot-me is the layer above project memory: invariant facts about the human, not the project.

Why three files, not one

the three files have different lifecycles:

• identity.yaml — rarely changes (your name, timezone, dogs). near-static.
• voice.md — stable, occasionally refined. medium velocity.
• preferences.yaml — churns (you swap editors, change themes, update the avoid lists).

separating by lifecycle lets consumers cache the stable parts and re-load the volatile parts independently. a combined me.md would force all three to share a cache fate and re-invalidate the stable parts whenever the volatile parts changed.

Reading the files

dot-me content is meant to be loaded into the agent's instruction context at session start. it is NOT a runtime tool surface. consumers MUST NOT expose ~/.me/ as model-callable retrievable content (a tool, an MCP resource, a filesystem path the agent has standing read permission to use on demand) after startup.