How is PAI designed to do this? Capture and hierarchise personal archive, ideas, manage todos and schedule prioritisation...

[stephtara]

As I work on trying to get my DA to do what I'm hoping it'll do and workaround some release gaps (amnesia and other broken workflows -- not criticism, I know PAI has holes) I find myself often asking myself (and my DA, to the extent I suggested we build a PAIExpert agent) "are we building a parallel system to PAI here or is there already something in PAI that should be able to deal with this?"

I'm not a developer. I'm more of a thinker and systems-fixer, with some tools and skills to actually help me do that. I also have ADHD and I'm recovering from a brain injury, which means I struggle with a certain number of challenges: a lot of hyperactivity means I have tons of ideas all of the time, difficulty with task-initiation and follow-through, prioritisation, difficulty keeping track of my todos and ongoing projects. After approximately 30 years of rich and intense online life where I have pretty much thrown nothing away, I have a huge personal digital archive containing a lot of raw material I always knew I'd one day have tools to help me manage. It feels like the day has come.

So here are the things I'm hoping my DA will help me with, in addition to adding development skills I'm missing to actually bring into reality some of my digital projects.

• keep my digital archive organised and usable ("I wrote something about xyz at some point, didn't I?" or "I know I heard something about this in a podcast, what was it?" and "ok, now let's pull together all of my creating writing snippets related to grief over three decades, and let's see if there's something to do with all that today")
• make links between what I'm doing now and things from the past that might be relevant
• stay on top of my "open loops" and reduce friction to task initiation or getting back onto something by making it easy for me to recall what I did last and what were the next steps when I left it
• help my prioritise (both micro and macro) by taking into account dependencies between open loops (whether tasks or projects) and deeper purpose behind them ("why is this important and how does it align with my mission")
• help me manage motivation and energy on a day-to-day basis

So, some of the things here are obviously already thought for in PAI, even if they may not work yet at the level I'd need. But for others, I don't know if I'm looking at a proper gap in PAI (and therefore, I just go ahead and design the system I need from scratch) or if there is actually a place for that "ready-made" (or close) in PAI.

Examples:

• all my ideas, ranging from "oh I should do this" (on a sliding scale from "just an idea" to "actually intend to") to "here's how the world works": do they go in KNOWLEDGE, or is that twisting the purpose?
• my personal archive (which is a mess right now): do I "absorb" it into the memory system? do parts live there and others elsewhere? There is unprocessed raw material, e.g. voice recordings, videos, years of geotagged photographs which tell the story of where I was when and what I was doing, IRC chat transcripts, courses I wrote, writing snippets, things I said in conversation or facebook comments that is not just chatting but gives insight into important issues for me, etc), there are 26+ years of blog posts, social media exports, etc -- or do I just organise this stuff in my own way?
• tracking todos (projects are taken care of by the system, that's pretty clear) -- do I build something ad hoc or is there already functionality inside PAI that could do that?
• keeping track of how everything I'm "doing" fits together, linking project A to goal x inside TELOS, understanding that task Y actually unlocks 5 different stalled projects even though it seems to have nothing to do with my wider mission... it feels like PAI "should" tackle this, but it doesn't seem to for me right now – how do I know if it's because I haven't been using it long enough, or if it just doesn't have that in the system, so I had better build it?
• keeping a timeline of my health (symptoms, medications, possible impacting events): is the health stuff inside PAI supposed to do this, or is what I'm thinking of different?
• I could go on... ;-)

I keep stumbling upon these questions because:

• I don't like reinventing the wheel and wasting energy when I already don't have enough for everything that is really important
• I believe that "going with the system" will give more ROI in the long-run than patching on ad hoc workarounds or duplicating functionality which may not be properly integrated with the rest, now or in the future.

Who else has been thinking about this kind of thing?
Have you had similar needs, and how did you choose to deal with them?
Do you have any answers or thoughts about this to help me move forward?

[nick-walt]

A good breakdown of most prolific peoples' lives and what seems Iike an ideal use case for PAI. Have you been using PAI with Claude and have you asked Claude to help create a prompt for each question that it can then use to find the solution in PAI's sc Scaffolding? Basically bootstrapping PAI.

Daniel is working on improving PAI's Scaffolding / Harness to improve Claude's ability to help the user customize / bootstrap PAI.

[stephtara]

Thanks! I'm not sure what you mean by "using PAI with Claude"? As I've understood now, PAI "is" Claude once installed. So yes, I have definitely been "using Claude=PAI" to try and answer all this, but I'm stumbling upon things like broken memory integrity (translation: recurring amnesia), system structure drift, etc, which are making my progress very slow. I'm finding that where I make best progress is when I guide more, so that's why I'm interested in understanding more about how the system is intended to work and how other people have done things.