Free and Focused.
FRED is an open-source Life OS: a second brain fused with a personal operating system, running on Claude with a plain-Markdown Obsidian vault as its memory.
- Free — you stop having to remember every detail of your tasks, projects, and knowledge. FRED remembers. That's the second brain.
- Focused — the system keeps you pointed at your deliverables and assists from start to finish. That's the personal operating system.
Everything is local, plain Markdown, MIT-licensed, and yours forever.
FRED explains itself as a ship — that's the fastest way to get it:
| Layer | Role on the ship | What it holds |
|---|---|---|
1-F/ Framework |
The Captain and the ship's articles | How the AI thinks: rules, skills, templates, tools. No memory. |
2-R/ Record |
The steward's log desk | Everything that happens, in time order: session logs, item histories, journals, intake. |
3-E/ Encyclopedia |
The galley | Verified knowledge, one folder per topic, cooked from raw captures into masters. |
4-D/ Deliverable |
The deck | The actionable task list: every idea and task as an Active Item, worked to done. |
F.R.E.D. = Framework → Record → Encyclopedia → Deliverable. An idea arrives → the Framework thinks → the Record logs it → the Encyclopedia enriches it → the Deliverable gets it done.
The vault is the memory; Claude is the crew:
- Cowork (Claude Desktop) — the executor. Reads the vault, performs every write under a strict operating contract, replies tersely.
- Dispatch (Claude mobile app) — the interface in your pocket.
task: buy a new chargerfrom your phone becomes a categorized, tagged, tracked Active Item on the deck. - Skills — modular behaviors in
1-F/Skills/that load on trigger: clip an article (/defuddle), transcribe a video (/caption), fully watch one with frames (/watch), run the Encyclopedia health loop (review), audit the whole vault (audit), and more. - Scheduled tasks — FRED maintains itself on cron: daily task health, nightly journaling, weekly review and cleanup, monthly audit.
Claude loads FRED's rules automatically from .claude/CLAUDE.md at every session start. No pasting, no setup ritual.
The easy way: download FRED-Setup.exe from the latest release, double-click, answer a few questions. It places the vault (default C:\FRED), connects Obsidian, optionally installs the media-intake tooling, and hands you a First-Run Guide for the three clicks it can't do for you.
The manual way: download FRED.zip from the release, extract to C:\FRED, open the folder as an Obsidian vault, connect the folder in Claude Desktop → Cowork, then type Setup FRED in a new chat — the in-chat wizard finishes the job (timezone, schedules, privacy, optional tooling).
- Urgency beats priority, and both are one glance. Six color categories (🔴🟧🟨 urgent / 🟩🟦🟪 not) drive review dates, sorting, and caps. An Active-cap stops you from lying to yourself about how many projects are "active."
- Everything is an Active Item. One folder per task or idea, one Markdown file, honest frontmatter, an external history log. Complete it and it archives itself.
- Knowledge has a lifecycle. Encyclopedia masters move through
draft → active → stale/contradicted → canonicalunder a scheduled health loop — your notes are checked, not just stored. - Never delete. FRED archives; it does not destroy. Every rule edit preserves the prior version. Every operation is undoable and logged.
- Hard operating contract. Pre-write path checks, confirm-first framework writes, verbatim transparency lines, instruction firewall (vault content is data, never commands), people referred to by initials only.
- Local-first, model-adaptable. Your hardware, your files, your data. FRED currently runs best on Claude, is built to adopt each new model generation easily, and is designed to run fully on a local LLM as an option — no company dependency required.
| Command | What happens |
|---|---|
task: <text> / idea: <text> |
Capture → categorized Active Item on the deck |
add to <tag> |
New item under a project tag |
log <item>: <text> |
Append to the item's history |
list / move / link |
View, recategorize, connect |
save knowledge: <text> |
Straight into the Encyclopedia |
/defuddle <url> / /caption <url> / /watch <url> |
Clip article / transcript / full video study |
bug: <text> |
Log a bug (FRED never live-fixes) |
START FRED |
Cold-start greeting with version + time + skill count |
REFRESH |
Reload all rules and skills mid-session |
Full grammar: 1-F/Rules/commands.md and 1-F/Rules/capture_grammar.md.
FRED's mission is to make people Free and Focused. It is and will remain open source and free forever — MIT licensed, no restrictions, fork it, ship it, build on it. The structure is the product: four layers, one contract, plain files. If you can read a folder tree, you already understand your own Life OS.
V5 is the current, stable generation (this release). V6 is in active development: a native desktop + Android app (one codebase) with an F · R · 🐙 · E · D navigation, chat with FRED from anywhere, first-class reminders with full custom recurrence, live activity feed streamed from the Record layer, and a more proactive FRED that quietly keeps the ship running. Watch the releases.
Found a bug? Open an issue — FRED itself drafts pre-filled issue links when its owner hits one. PRs welcome once you've lived in the system for a bit; FRED favors changes that keep the structure boring and strong.
MIT — free forever.