SoulOS stamps a complete writing estate onto your own computer in one command: your voice law, a verbatim well that keeps every word, writing lanes, a gate that blocks anything that does not sound like you, and a one-command seal to GitHub. You leave owning infrastructure, not notes.
$ SOULOS_KEY=•••••••• bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://owos.ai/install.sh)"
Not a subscription you rent. A git repository on your own machine that keeps working after you close the tool, after the vendor changes its pricing, after the model you liked gets retired.
Twelve questions write how you actually sound. Every tool that ever writes in your name has to obey it.
Every word you speak lands dated and word for word before any shaping. It is evidence, never edited. This is the moat.
One switchboard routes a piece of talk to the right lane, so the same voice ships to every channel you choose.
A script reads your own banned list and fails the build on anything that sounds like a machine wrote it.
Nothing reaches GitHub except by one command that you run. Agents stage the work. You turn the key.
Your colors, type, logo, and figure rules live in one place, so every output looks like it belongs together.
Frameworks, comparisons, timelines, and diagrams are generated from a compact specification in your own style.
Approved chapters become a finished book, a PDF, and a public site without copying the work into another system.
Engine updates add capability while protecting your voice law, brand, chapters, and verbatim evidence.
You open the folder in Claude, Cowork, or Codex and you talk. Dictation, typing, pasting, it does not matter. What matters is the order things happen in: your words land verbatim before anything is shaped from them, drafts get built only from what you actually said, the gate runs before anything is called done, and the last move is always yours.
Nothing above is a mockup of a product that does not exist. Every step is a file changing on your own disk: an append to the well, a chapter written from it, a gate that exits non zero, and one command you run yourself.
This is the real tree the stamp lays down, with the real contents. Click any file.
You open your estate in Claude, Cowork, or Codex and paste in one file that is sitting right there. It interviews you one question at a time, and never polishes your answers. What comes out is the constitution of your estate, and it outranks every other instruction any tool is ever given inside that folder. Say the answers out loud rather than typing them. Typing makes you edit yourself.
Two versions ship in the folder. The short interview is twelve questions and about twenty minutes, enough to start writing today. The long interview is a hundred questions across six territories, an hour or two, and it produces a voice law with enough grain that a machine can write a full chapter without drifting. Run the short one now and the long one when you are ready.
# SOUL.md · the voice law of Alex Rivera ## The one rule Nothing ships in Alex Rivera's name that Alex Rivera would not say out loud. ## How I sound <-- filled from questions 1, 2, 4, 8, 11 ## Reference sample, verbatim <-- your own two paragraphs, quoted exactly ## Where my analogies come from <-- your home field, from question 5 ## Hard bans, machine checked No em dashes. No en dashes. No curly quotes.
This is scripts/qc_check.py, reimplemented here line for line. It reads the banned list out of your own SOUL.md, scans your writing, prints what failed, and exits non zero so nothing ships. Type in the left box.
Speak, and it lands dated and word for word before anything is shaped from it. The file is append only. No tool is allowed to edit it, reorder it, or trim it. When a chapter later claims you said something, the receipt is right there.
Every rule file in the estate says the same thing in different words: the well is evidence. The Scribe hat may read it and build from it. Nothing may rewrite it.
The one hat allowed to write chapters is only allowed to build from what you actually said. Lived details are never invented. If you did not say it happened, it did not happen.
The voice gate skips the well entirely. Your raw speech is allowed to be messy. Only what ships has to be clean.
You say what the thing is. The switchboard decides where it lands. The lanes you do not want stay empty until you want them.
Chapters, figures, and the compiled book. The Scribe hat writes here, in first person, in your voice, from the well. One command turns it into an HTML and PDF book.
One dated folder per piece, with a Substack cut and a LinkedIn cut beside the master. Every article is a seed that can grow into a chapter or a lesson.
Modules and lessons built from what you already wrote. Blueprint before prose, always.
Your visual identity is one file. Five styles ship with the estate, and you can build your own. Every figure you ever make asks that file, so nothing is hardcoded and changing your mind later costs one edit rather than a day of rework. These are the five, in their real colors.
Seventeen figure shapes are built in, grouped into processes, frameworks, structures, comparisons, and statements. Write four lines of JSON, run one command, get an SVG in your colors with your name and your copyright line on it. Set your own hex values, your own fonts, your logo, and whether the line work reads as drawn by hand or plotted by a machine.
$ python3 scripts/figure.py --previewThese were not drawn for this page. Every one came out of the engine your estate ships with, from a spec of four or five lines. They are grouped by what they do to an idea, and each family below is shown in a different one of the five brands, so you can see the range twice over. Pick the shape that fits the argument, and it arrives in your colours with your name and your copyright already on it.
How a thing moves from one end to the other
shown in Sketchbook"type": "sequence""type": "funnel""type": "chain""type": "loop""type": "timeline"A named way of thinking somebody can repeat
shown in Editorial Modern"type": "framework""type": "matrix""type": "venn"What holds what up
shown in Blueprint"type": "stack""type": "iceberg""type": "network"This against that, and the distance between
shown in Clean"type": "comparison""type": "balance""type": "gap""type": "curve"One thing, made large
shown in Press"type": "stat""type": "quote"One spec, one command, five brands. Typeface, palette, line quality, and ornament all change together, because they all come from one file. This is what stops your work looking like everybody else who bought the same tool.
None of these is the house style. Copy the closest one, change the values, give it your own name, and it becomes yours. Your fonts, your hex values, your logo, your copyright line, and whether the line work reads as drawn by hand or plotted by a machine.
One command turns your profile, your published articles, and your compiled book into a small static site in your own colours and typeface, with an RSS feed. No CMS, no subscription, no theme marketplace. It is the same material your book is made of, arranged for a stranger.
$ python3 scripts/build_site.pyYour profile and credentials, every article you marked published, and the compiled book with a link to the PDF. All of it in your brand, so the site, the figures, and the book look like one hand made them.
SOUL.md, the interviews, the raw dictation, and any article not explicitly marked published. The builder checks its own output before it finishes and stops with an error if any of that reached the page. Your voice law is not content.
Point GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages at the folder and it is online at your own domain. The builder prints the command and never runs it, the same rule as the seal. Publishing is a thing you do, not a thing that happens to you.
No abstractions. This is the sequence, and how long each part takes.
You run one command and answer four questions: your name, a folder name, your first book title, your GitHub username if you have one.
You open the folder in your AI tool and paste in INTERVIEW.md. Twelve questions, one at a time.
You speak or paste. It lands verbatim and dated in the well before anything is shaped from it.
One command creates the private GitHub repo. From then on one command ships everything.
Some of an estate is scripts that execute. Most of it is law that any AI tool reads and obeys inside that folder. Both are real, and they are not the same thing, so here is which is which.
Requirements: a Mac or a Linux machine, git, and python3. A GitHub account and the gh command only on the day you want to publish. Until then the estate works with no network at all.
These four are being generalised out of the estate this was built from, the one behind THE STEERSMAN and the One Water body of work. They are not promises about a roadmap somebody might fund. They are working scripts being made fit for somebody who is not their author.
Reads a finished chapter or article and proposes assessment questions tied back to the exact passage they came from. This is the piece that makes the courses lane real instead of an empty folder.
Reads a draft the way a good editor does: what is weak, what is unearned, where the argument sags. It reports and never rewrites, because the gates in this estate advise and you decide.
Reads the well and everything you have published and proposes what connects to what. The move that turns a pile of files into a body of work, and the reason an estate compounds instead of just accumulating.
Typographic covers in your brand, generated as SVG so nothing needs installing. It pairs with the book compiler that already ships, so a finished book arrives with a face on it.
When each one ships, one command brings it into an estate you already stamped: bash scripts/update_estate.sh. It never touches your voice law, your brand, your chapters, or the well. You do not reinstall, and you do not start again.