YOS: Your Operating System (and mine)

YOS stands for Your Operating System. Also, if you squint a little — Yury’s OS. Both readings are intentional.

It’s a git repository. Inside — markdown files. That’s it. No app, no database, no SaaS subscription. Just a folder structure, a set of conventions, and an AI assistant that knows how to read them.

The idea

Every productivity system eventually fails for the same reason: it lives in someone else’s tool. You adapt to the tool’s mental model. You lose context when switching between apps. The data is scattered.

YOS flips this. Instead of adapting to an app, you build your own system from plain files. The structure maps to how you actually think about your life — areas, projects, habits, journal, inbox, finances. The AI reads these files and operates within your context. It doesn’t start from zero every conversation — it knows your priorities, your goals, your patterns.

Think of it this way:

Files = memory. If it’s not written down, the system doesn’t know about it.
AI = processor. It reads memory, processes requests, updates state.
Git = time machine. Every commit is a snapshot of your life’s state. You can go back and see how priorities shifted, what habits stuck, what fell off.

The structure

_yos/
├── system/          # Who you are: values, goals, principles
├── areas/           # Life areas: health, career, relationships
├── projects/        # Active projects with tasks
├── habits/          # Definitions + daily logs
├── journal/         # Daily entries (YYYY/MM/DD.md)
├── inbox/           # Quick capture: thoughts, ideas, tasks
├── finances/        # Ledger, budgets, forecasts
├── context/         # Collected context (browser history, interests)
└── reviews/         # Daily, weekly, monthly reviews

Each folder has a clear purpose. Each file is human-readable. No magic formats — just markdown with YAML frontmatter for metadata.

Principles

A few rules that keep the system alive:

Simplicity above all. Markdown and text. No dependencies, no build steps for the data layer. Everything reads without special tools.

Progress over perfection. A messy journal entry is infinitely better than no entry. The system grows with you.

Honest feedback. The system doesn’t flatter. If habits aren’t getting done — it’s visible. If a project is stalled — it’s obvious. Data tells the truth.

Context drives everything. No generic advice. Every suggestion is grounded in your actual profile, values, and current situation.

Minimal friction. The easier it is to put something into the system, the more often it happens. Inbox is the entry point for everything.

Regular reviews. The system works when you come back to it. Morning review, evening reflection, weekly retro — rituals that keep the system alive.

How AI fits in

The CLAUDE.md file in the repo root is the system prompt — a firmware of sorts. It tells the AI:

What the structure means
How to respond to natural language triggers (“good morning” → run morning routine)
When to read which files
How to update state (log habits, create journal entries, add to inbox)

The AI isn’t just answering questions. It’s operating the system — reading files, writing updates, tracking progress. Say “good morning” and it runs a full routine: check-in on how you slept, review today’s calendar, scan tasks, propose a day plan. Say “how was the week” and it compiles a weekly review from journal entries and habit logs.

The key insight: the AI gets better as the system accumulates data. More journal entries = better understanding of patterns. More habit logs = more honest feedback on what’s actually working. It’s a flywheel.

Why not Notion / Obsidian / Todoist / …?

Those tools are great. I’ve used most of them. But:

No vendor lock-in. My data is markdown in git. I can switch AI providers, editors, or tools without migrating anything.
Full programmability. I can write scripts that operate on the data. Automations, imports, custom reports — all trivial with plain text files.
AI-native from day one. The system was designed for AI to read and write. Not retrofitted with a plugin.
Git history is underrated. git log on your life decisions is a superpower.

What’s next

YOS is a living system — it changes as needs change. Some things I’m exploring:

Browser history analysis to auto-update interest profiles
Financial forecasting with plain-text ledgers
Automated weekly reviews that surface patterns I might miss

The whole point is that it’s yours. Fork the concept, change the structure, add what matters to you. The OS metaphor holds: the kernel is simple, the modules are yours to build.

This blog itself is part of YOS — a project that started as a line in inbox/, became a file in projects/, and is now live at bookoff.me.