myPKA

ICOR for Life continues as myPKA 7. Since October 2026 this folder and the AI team ship again as one download, under the name it started with: myPKA. Get the whole folder from the myPKA releases: https://github.com/myICOR/myPKA/releases/latest (or from Tom's Tool Lab on myICOR). This repository keeps the rooms, templates, guidelines, life scripts and the Obsidian setup that go into it.

Start here: the tour

A walkthrough of the folder: what each room is for, how the AI team works with you, and how to get your first session running.

If the player does not appear, open it here: https://youtu.be/GLO1voinujQ

Learn it properly in the free myPKA course: https://app.myicor.com/courses/mypka-system

What myPKA is

myPKA stands for My Personal Knowledge Assistance. It is your life and your work in one folder of plain markdown files, organised by ICOR (Input, Control, Output, Refine), with an AI team that works in that folder with you.

• Your files stay yours. Plain text in a folder on your own computer. No account, no database, no lock-in. Any editor opens it, any backup keeps it.
• One place for everything. Notes, journal, contacts, goals, projects, tasks, work in progress and the data your notes cannot hold. Business and personal side by side.
• An AI team, not a chatbot. Larry, the orchestrator, listens to you and hands each job to the specialist who owns it. Every agent has a written contract, every routine a written procedure (SOP), so the team behaves the same way tomorrow as today, with any AI model.
• Works with any AI, and without one. Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor, or any AI chat that can read and write files. Everything also works by hand.

Your AI team

You talk to Larry. He decides who does the work and never does a specialist's job himself.

Agent	What they do
Larry	The orchestrator: your one entry point; routes, plans with you, sums up
Penn	Knowledge processor: scratchpads, inbox captures, journal entries, filing into your Inner World
Nolan	HR: hires a new specialist when a job has no owner
Pax	Researcher: outside facts, web research, checks before action
Mack	Automation: tool connections (MCP, API, webhooks), automations, imports from a service
Silas	Structure and databases: properties, Bases, the vault health checks, the shape of an import
Iris	Design system: creates and guards your visual style
Charta	Structured visuals: infographics, tables, diagrams, one-pagers, PDFs
Flint	Obsidian platform: plugins, themes, what the Obsidian API allows
Ada	Planning and audit: written plans for bigger jobs, drift checks of the team's own machinery
Mason	Plugin contributor: turns a plugin bug or wish into a fix and a pull request
Vex	Security reviewer: reviews anything you did not write before it runs (an MCP server, a plugin, a script, a pack, a new dependency) and audits your app's security; proves, never applies the fix
Felix	Frontend developer: builds, fixes and audits web UI in your own code projects; code stays outside the folder
Vera	Quality gate: checks a visual or a web UI against your design system, WCAG 2.2 AA and the reader's needs; APPROVED, CONDITIONAL or BLOCKED
Pixel	Image maker: thumbnails, social images, covers, illustrations, agent avatars in your own look, or a ready image brief when no image generator is connected

Vex, Felix, Vera and Pixel were separate agent packs until myPKA 7. They are part of the team now. The full roster, with when to route to whom, is in 06 AI Team/Agents/agent-index.md. Need a role nobody covers? Ask Larry: Nolan hires them.

Use it with any AI. Obsidian is optional

The folder is the product. Nothing in it needs Obsidian.

• With an AI tool: open the folder in Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI or Cursor (the folder that holds AGENTS.md) and say hello to Larry. AGENTS.md is the one entry file every tool reads; the host files in .claude/, .codex/ and .gemini/ give each tool the team's agents and skills.
• With an AI chat: any assistant that can read and write the files of a folder can work here. Point it at AGENTS.md first.
• With no AI at all: the folder works fully by hand. Its scripts need Python 3.9 or newer and nothing else (on Windows, type py -3 where a command says python3).

If you like Obsidian, open the folder as a vault and click "Trust author and enable plugins". Twelve ICOR for Life plugins are pre-installed and switch on: Planner, Focus, Connect, AI Chat, Interface, Scaffold Check, SQLite Viewer, Terminal, Outliner, PDF Annotation, Canvases and Scratchpad. The folder opens in the INKLINE theme. You can switch any plugin off, or ignore Obsidian completely: the plugins only add an interface on top of the same files.

What is inside

Room	What it holds
00 Daily Scratchpad/	Your post-it. One note per day, written by you, deliberately messy. Never deleted. The team extracts from it on your command.
01 Inbox/	The hand-over point. Anything you give to the AI team lands here and gets processed out. Outer-world captures (web clips, scans, voice memos) arrive in Outer World/ and survive, stamped, in its archive/.
02 Planner/	Your real task list, synced. One note per open item from Todoist, ClickUp, flagged email and calendar, tended by the Planner plugin. The team plans and executes from here.
03 WiP/	The workbench. Work goes into one of four topic folders (Workstreams, AI Team, Projects, Operations), dated inside it; finished work retires to _archive/.
04 Inner World/	Everything that went through you: Contacts, Journal, Notes, and My Life (Goals, Key Elements, Topics, Projects, Habits).
05 Assets/	The binary shelf: images, audio, documents. Notes embed them; no knowledge lives here.
06 AI Team/	The team: agent contracts, shared knowledge (SOPs, Workstreams, Guidelines, Scripts), tasks, session logs and Expansions.
07 Databases/	The data shelf. SQLite databases with no markdown source. Ships empty.

Expansions

06 AI Team/Expansions/ holds optional add-ons that are not switched on. Its README.md lists them. Ask Larry: "I want the Designer Pack. Inspect it, explain what it adds and install it." Your AI explains each step and asks before it copies anything. Some of these packs were written for the older folder layout (myPKA 5, ICOR for Life 1.x); their note says so, and your AI adapts them to this folder with you before it installs anything.

Start in five minutes

1. Unzip the download into a folder of your own, for example Documents/myPKA.
2. Open that folder in your AI tool and say: "Hello Larry, show me around." Or open it in Obsidian as a vault and trust the author.
3. Write into today's Daily Scratchpad, then tell Larry: "process my scratchpad". No AI at hand? Carry the pieces into their homes yourself; the walkthrough is 06 AI Team/AI Team Knowledge/Guidelines/GL-1007-capture-and-where-things-go.md, "Doing it by hand, step by step".
4. Something someone else made? Clip it into 01 Inbox/Outer World/ with one line of why. The Web Clipper template in 06 AI Team/AI Team Knowledge/Templates/web-clipper-outer-world.json does it in one click.
5. Learn the five ways of taking a note: 06 AI Team/AI Team Knowledge/Guidelines/GL-1010-the-five-capture-workflows.md.

Updating

From myPKA 6 with ICOR for Life 2 in one folder (mode A): download mypka-<version>.zip (7.0.1 or later), check it (below), then from your folder run, first as a dry run, then with --live, with your version in place of <version>:

python3 "06 AI Team/AI Team Knowledge/Scripts/mypka-update.py" --release mypka-<version>.zip
python3 "06 AI Team/AI Team Knowledge/Scripts/mypka-update.py" --release mypka-<version>.zip --product icor

The first brings the team (Vex, Felix, Vera and Pixel included), the second the rooms and guidelines. Nothing you edited is overwritten: where a file you changed has a newer version, it lands next to yours as <file>.update. Nothing is ever deleted.

Vex, Felix, Vera or Pixel already installed as a pack? Before the update, ask your AI to remove the pack the way its README says (expansion-pack.py remove <name> --approved): it deletes only files you never edited, and your journal and AGENT.local.md stay. The update then brings the team version.

From myPKA 5 or ICOR for Life 1.x: start a fresh folder from this download and move your notes over with Larry. MIGRATING-FROM-5.md in the myPKA repository has the steps.

The Scaffold Check plugin (in Obsidian) compares your folder with the latest release and reports what is missing, what changed upstream and what you edited yourself. It only looks; it never changes anything.

Check that a download is genuine

Every release zip carries a build-provenance attestation. Before you unpack a download, check it with the GitHub CLI (gh), as one line:

gh attestation verify mypka-<version>.zip --repo myICOR/myPKA --signer-workflow myICOR/myPKA/.github/workflows/release-mypka.yml --source-ref refs/tags/v<version> --deny-self-hosted-runners

Use the download only if it prints that verification succeeded.

Learn the concepts

• The myPKA course: how the team works with your files, and how to build your own system.
• The ICOR Journey: the courses this folder puts into practice.
• Inner World and Outer World: the one lesson that explains this folder's deepest split.

An experiment from Tom's Tool Lab

myPKA is something Tom (Thomas Roedl) builds and uses himself, and shares as a starting point and as inspiration, not as a finished product.

• It may change from one release to the next. There is no support schedule, no promise of bug fixes and no feature release cycle.
• You are responsible for what you install and run, for its security, and for how you use it in your own systems. Back up your files first. If you are not sure what a step does, ask your AI to explain it, or do not run it.
• Questions and ideas: under the myPKA videos on myICOR.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.md. The INKLINE theme, the libraries some plugins bundle and our names and logos keep their own terms, listed there and in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.