This is the friendly manual. It explains what you've got, how the pieces work, and how to make it yours. No jargon without explanation. No steps without context.
MyCapsul has four main pieces. They all live on your machine and work together. Here's what each one does.
An AI partner powered by Claude (Anthropic's AI) running through Cowork (Anthropic's desktop environment). MyCapsul doesn't build its own AI — it gives Claude a framework so it can work as your agent, with your context, on your machine.
A visual command center — a single HTML file that shows your schedule, budget, tasks, countdowns, and priorities. It runs in your browser, stores data locally, and your agent can update it for you.
A set of local files that hold everything about your life — identity, finances, schedule, health, career, goals. These are plain text files (mostly markdown) that you and your agent both read and write. This is your personal knowledge base.
A drop folder called _inbox/ inside your MyCapsul directory. Throw anything in here — a file, a bank statement, an email forward, a note to yourself. Your agent picks it up, reads it, routes it to the right Seed file, and tells you what it did.
MyCapsul doesn't build an AI. It turns a world-class AI into one that works for you — with your context, your files, your rules, on your machine.
When you open MyCapsul for the first time, here's what happens — and what you should expect.
The first time you open your dashboard, a setup wizard appears. It walks you through 5 steps to personalize your Capsul before your first agent session. Takes about 2 minutes — and every step is skippable.
After the wizard, start a Cowork session. Here's the flow:
It reads your Seed files, checks your inbox for anything you dropped in, pulls your schedule, and loads the session handoff from last time. On your very first session, there's no history yet — so it'll introduce itself and pick up from what you configured in the wizard.
This is where the Seed starts growing. Talk about your job, your family, your schedule patterns, your bills, your goals. Your agent will organize this into the right files automatically. You don't need to know the file structure — just talk.
As your agent learns about your life, it can populate your dashboard — schedule blocks for your day, countdown timers for upcoming deadlines, budget numbers, your Focus 3 priorities. The dashboard goes from blank to useful in one conversation.
At the end of your first session, your agent writes a handoff — a short summary of what it learned and what's pending. Next time you open MyCapsul, it picks up right where you left off. No re-explaining. No "let me remind you..."
The Seed is what makes MyCapsul actually know you. It's a folder of plain text files — organized by topic, readable by humans and AI alike. Here's what's inside.
Your agent doesn't read every Seed file every time. The router tells it which file to open based on the topic at hand. When you mention money, it opens finances.md. When you mention a date, it opens schedule.md. This keeps things fast and focused.
Every time your agent updates a Seed file, it logs the change — what changed, when, and why. This creates a running history of your life data. You can always look back and see exactly what was updated and when.
Your Capsul Agent is Claude — running through Cowork, guided by your MyCapsul framework. It's not a search engine. It's not Siri. It's more like a chief of staff who's been briefed on your entire life. Here's how to get the most out of it.
You don't need special commands or prompts. Say "I have a dentist appointment next Tuesday at 2:30" and your agent will update your schedule, check for conflicts, and note it in the changelog. Say "how much do I owe on my credit card?" and it'll pull from finances.md.
When you share new information mid-conversation — a new bill, a schedule change, a health update — your agent writes it to the correct Seed file immediately. It doesn't batch things up and maybe forget later. It files it right now.
Your agent presents options — it doesn't make decisions for you. If there's a budget call, a scheduling conflict, or anything involving money or family, it'll flag it and ask. You decide. It executes.
Upcoming deadlines, bills due, schedule conflicts, things that need attention — your agent surfaces these proactively. Part of the boot process is scanning for what matters today. You don't have to remember to check. It checks for you.
The dashboard is your visual layer — everything your Seed knows, made visible. It's a single HTML file that runs in your browser. No login. No account. Just open it. Here's what's on it.
The examples below may look different from yours — that's because you can always ask your agent to customize your dashboard's look and feel.
Want to change something? Just tell your agent. "Add a countdown for March 28th." "Change my schedule template for off-weeks." "Show me this week's spending breakdown." Conversation is the settings panel. No menus to dig through.
Your dashboard has more built-in features than you might notice at first. Here's what's available from the header and tiles.
Click the gear icon in the header. This opens the Settings drawer where you can change your color palette (7 options: MyCapsul brand default, Ocean, Sunset, Forest, Lavender, Amber, Slate), show/hide tiles, drag tiles to reorder them, and manage your agent sync connection.
Each tile has a resize button (in the tile header) that lets you pick from compact, standard, wide, or full-width sizes. You can also drag tiles to reorder them from the Settings drawer, or just tell your agent: "Move the budget tile above the calendar."
Every tile has an ℹ️ button that opens a quick overview — what the tile does, how to use it, and suggestions for things to tell your agent. Great for learning the system without reading the full docs.
Click on the Ring Planner to edit your schedule blocks for any day. Each block has a category (work, build, family, admin, personal, break) that determines its color. Your agent generates these from your schedule each session, but you can also edit them manually.
Click any day on the Calendar tile to see a popover with that day's events and a mini Ring preview. Click the pin icon to keep the popover open while you navigate. If you're in co-parent mode, custody weeks are highlighted with a subtle background tint. US holidays appear automatically.
At the end of the year (or anytime you want), open your TimeCapsul from the Timeline tile. It generates a visual summary of your year — monthly highlights, goal progress, journal excerpts, and cube completions. Your agent contributes milestone data throughout the year so the review is rich and personal.
Click the "How it works" button in the header to see a visual tour of all core features. Hover over any tile preview to see it animate. The overview also has a docs bar linking to these support documents.
MyCapsul gets smarter because every session follows the same loop. Your agent boots, works, wraps, and hands off — so the next session always picks up where you left off.
There's no machine learning model being trained on you. No neural network remembering your patterns. It's simpler and more transparent than that — your agent reads files, updates files, and writes a handoff. The next agent reads the handoff and picks up where the last one stopped. Cumulative knowledge through structured text. You can read every word of it.
The inbox is the simplest part of MyCapsul. It's a folder called _inbox/ inside your MyCapsul/ directory — created automatically during setup. Drop things in it. Your agent handles the rest.
_inbox/ folderA bank statement CSV, a school calendar PDF, a note you wrote on your phone, an email you forwarded — anything. Just put it in the MyCapsul/_inbox/ folder on your machine.
At the start of every session (or when you say "check the inbox"), your agent reads everything new. It figures out what the file is and where the information belongs.
New bill? Goes to finances.md. School event? Goes to schedule.md. Bank statement? Gets processed and spending data extracted. Your agent tells you exactly what it did with each file.
MyCapsul is a framework, not a cage. Everything is built on open formats you already know — markdown, JSON, HTML. There's no plugin system to learn, no app store to browse, no proprietary format locking you in. The architecture is the extensibility.
MyCapsul doesn't decide what domains of your life to support. The Seed pattern works for anything — add a new markdown file, tell your agent about it, and that part of your life is now inside the system. The same structure that tracks your finances can track your fitness, your creative projects, your side business, or your kid's soccer schedule.
Want to track something new? Just say so. "Start tracking my photography gear and shoots." Your agent creates a new markdown file, adds it to the router, and it's part of your Capsul from that point forward. No setup wizard. No configuration screen.
The dashboard is a single HTML file. Want a new card? A different layout? A tracker for something specific to your life? Tell your agent. It reads the dashboard, understands the structure, and writes the changes. You can also open it in any code editor — it's just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
MyCapsul's operating manual is a markdown file your agent reads every session. Want it to check a specific inbox every morning? Remind you about a weekly commitment? Follow a particular workflow when you say a trigger phrase? Add it to the protocols. Your agent follows your rules — literally.
Power users can build complete subsystems on top of the MyCapsul framework. A music producer could add a Seed module for project tracking, a dashboard tab for session logs, and protocols for how the agent handles mix notes. A freelancer could build invoicing, client management, and project timelines — all using the same patterns that already run the core system.
Open by Design
Your data files
Markdown and JSON. Open them in any text editor. Read them, edit them, delete them. They're yours.
Your dashboard
Single HTML file. Works in any browser. Modify it yourself or ask your agent. No build tools needed.
Your operating manual
A markdown file that defines how your agent behaves. Change the rules anytime — it reads them fresh every session.
Your session history
Handoff files and changelogs. Plain text records of every session — portable, searchable, human-readable.
No proprietary formats. No vendor lock-in. No export needed — it's already in formats you can use anywhere.
When you start your first Cowork session, you select a folder on your computer — this is where MyCapsul lives. Your agent creates a MyCapsul/ directory inside that folder, and everything goes in there: your dashboard, your Seed, your inbox, your widgets, your agent config. One folder, fully self-contained.
MyCapsul is the framework — the rules, the guidance, the process and systems to make Claude your Capsul Agent.
When your agent needs to think, it sends only the context for the current task through Anthropic's encrypted API connection. Your full dataset never leaves your machine. The AI processes your request and writes the result back to your local files. That's the complete data flow — your machine to encrypted API and back. Nothing stored in the cloud.
You select the parent folder during setup — could be your Documents folder, Desktop, or anywhere you want. MyCapsul creates a MyCapsul/ directory inside it with all the scaffolding: seed/ for your knowledge base, _inbox/ for file drops, widgets/ for custom tiles, and your dashboard HTML file.
Markdown, JSON, HTML. Open them in any editor. Read them, change them, delete them. There's no proprietary format keeping you locked in.
Account numbers, passwords, and sensitive identifiers are stored in protected local files. Your agent can reference them when needed but never sends them through the AI connection.
Want a backup? Copy the MyCapsul/ folder. That's it. Everything is files — dashboard, Seed, widgets, agent config. Stick it on a USB drive, external disk, or anywhere you keep important stuff.
The terms, the states, the concepts — all in one place.
| Term | What It Is |
|---|---|
| MyCapsul | The product — a personal life operating system. Framework + AI + dashboard. |
| Your Capsul | Your personal instance — your data, your agent, your dashboard, your preferences. |
| Capsul Agent | Your AI — powered by Claude, running through Cowork, guided by MyCapsul's framework. Reads your Seed, learns through conversation, gets better over time. |
| Seed | Your local knowledge base — modular markdown files organized by life topic. |
| Nodes | Life categories: Financial, Career, Health, Home, Creative, etc. Cubes belong to Nodes. |
| Cubes | Things to get done. Each has a state, energy level, urgency, and progress log. |
| Ring | Your 24-hour circular clock. Shows your day as colored time blocks. |
| Blocks | Time chunks on the Ring — each has a category, label, and color. |
| Focus 3 | Your top 3 priorities for today. Agent-recommended, you-approved. |
| Energy Level | Low / Med / High — how much a task takes out of you, not just how long it takes. |
| Inbox | Drop folder for files. Agent reads, routes, and reports. Zero-friction input. |
| Handoff | Short summary written at session end so the next session picks up seamlessly. |
| Changelog | Timestamped log of every Seed update. Full audit trail of your data. |
| Router | The index file that maps topics to Seed modules. Add a new module, add it to the router. |
| Operating Manual | Markdown file (CLAUDE.md) that defines your agent's behavior, protocols, and rules. |
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
| ✨ Spark | Just an idea. Captured before it disappears. |
| ⏸ Parked | On hold. You care, but it's not moving right now. |
| ▶ Active | In rotation. You're working on it when you can. |
| 🎯 Focus | Front and center. Your current sprint. |
| ✅ Done | Completed. Archived with a full progress log. |