v1 (Cowork edition)
Quickstart. Open Cowork. Create a new project, name it whatever you'd call your CoS (mine's Kubrick). Connect Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack, and Docs (built-in connectors, no code). Drop v1-desktop.md into the workspace folder. In Cowork, say: "Read v1-desktop.md and help me build my chief of staff." It walks you through everything. ~2-3 hours to a working CoS.
I used my new chief of staff to draft this post. I shared a dozen samples of my writing with it and told it to go and it got close enough for me to come into Obsidian and start tweaking (Ed. - this sentence for example).
My Chief of Staff is called Kubrick - KUBRICK 1000 to be exact. Kubrick holds my context — goals, failure modes, coaching practice, what I'm trying to build, and shares a morning brief at 8am each weekday that tells me what's actually worth doing that day. Today's brief told me to publish this.
A month ago I mapped seven ways to build an AI Chief of Staff informed by research and a half dozen conversations with folks in the trenches building their own agentic Chiefs of Staff. I modeled this version loosely on both Karpathy's Second Brain idea and Open Claw's system of soul files and heartbeats.
Today I'm writing about and open-sourcing my v1 and I'm calling it founder-cos. It will be a public series, a public repo, and a real-time build-in-public arc that you can follow along with. I hope you do!
This v1 is intended to be fully compatible with a $20/mo Claude Pro subscription and minimal familiarity with Cowork. You don't need to code, you don't need to open a terminal. You don't need a Mac Mini or a VPS. You just create a new project in Cowork, connect your tools (Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack, Docs all have built-in connectors), drop in the blueprint, and the agent starts asking you questions. It builds out a full filesystem and scheduling system to start running your CoS the next day. You use it and talk to it everyday from your computer and your mobile phone.
The series promise: zero to a fresh CoS in a day, with a clear roadmap to a true CoS companion that shapes your day and helps you realize your most important business goals then progresses to increasingly personal, data-informed, interactive and always on assistants.
v1 — Desktop. Live today.
Cowork on your Mac. The file stack (SOUL · USER · AGENTS · MEMORY · HEARTBEAT · TODOS) holds your context, your goals, and your weekly cadence. Heartbeats fire as Cowork scheduled tasks: morning brief, Monday goal-set, Friday recap, monthly memory consolidation. The catch: your computer has to be awake.
v2 — Always-On. Two weeks.
Same brain, same knowledge base, but fired from the cloud via Claude Routines instead of your laptop. The brain lives in a private repo and the brief still fires with or without your computer. The laptop tether goes away but you're still in Cowork and you don't have to learn Claude Code or open a terminal.
v3 — Self-Hosted + Custom. Coming soon.
Your own runtime (VPS), custom MCPs, custom code via Claude Agent SDK. Your runtime, your code.
v4 — Beyond Anthropic. Coming later
Same brain, swap any layer — including the model. GPT, Gemini, open weights. Brain ports across vendors.
Migrations are additive. SOUL, USER, domain files, memory — all carry forward unchanged each time. Only the substrate changes.
If you're trying to figure out which CoS to build, forking v1 should be enough to have one running for yourself tomorrow. The later versions are upgrade paths, not requirements. I'll be writing as I ship to keep myself honest: what worked, what broke, what I changed my mind about.
(What broke today: Cowork doesn't auto-load workspace files into new conversations. Wire the brain via the project Instructions field - exact text in the repo.)
Many thanks to the 41 commenters on the original 411 post — Noah Brier, Saadiq Rodgers-King, Craig Hepburn, David Blackburn, Ben Niehaus, Nick Panama, Adam Sandler. None of this would have been done without that thread.
Repo: https://github.com/tarikh/founder-cos
v1 blueprint: v1-desktop.md
v2 stub (with the two-week tease): v2-always-on.md
If you fork it, LMK. If you build something different, tell me that too. HMU here!