/Telos

name: Telos
evals:
  manual:
    reason: "whether a personal goal, belief, or strategy update is right needs the principal's approval against their intended state; the tool's write contract is the deterministic test above"
    falsifier: "the principal rejects an update as inaccurate, unauthorized, or inconsistent with the intended goals"
metadata:
  short-description: "Read or update personal TELOS goals, beliefs, and strategies; analyze project dependencies and alignment. Use Interview for conversational state refresh."
version: 1.1.3
description: Personal TELOS reads and updates goals, beliefs, narratives, and strategies with timestamped backups; Project TELOS analyzes .md/.csv directories for dependencies, bottlenecks, and alignment. USE WHEN Telos, life goals, projects, dependencies, update TELOS, narrative points, McKinsey report, dashboard, what am I wrong about, life frames, mental models. NOT FOR conversational constitutional review (Interview).

Telos

**Contents:** Ideal State · Intent Routing · Data & Config · Project TELOS Analysis · Building Dashboards · Gotchas · Examples

Reads and changes the principal's personal TELOS (life goals, ideal and current state, beliefs, strategies, wisdom, lessons, wrong-beliefs and the rest) at `~/.claude/LIFEOS/USER/TELOS/`, every change made through the Update intent's tool with a timestamped backup and a changelog line, because a hand edit can lose history or break the structure other tools parse. **TELOS** (Telic Evolution and Life Operating System) is the context-gathering system behind it. The same skill also runs Project TELOS: it reads a directory of .md/.csv files for dependency chains (PROBLEMS→GOALS→STRATEGIES→PROJECTS), bottlenecks, alignment and progress, and renders the analysis as a McKinsey-style report, n=24 narrative points, or a Next.js dashboard built by parallel engineers.

Ideal State

• Personal TELOS changes only through the Update intent's tool: each change lands in the right file (and section, on a section-structured TELOS.md) with existing content preserved, a timestamped backup taken first, and a line in the changelog. The one other writer, the dashboard template's file save, keeps the same guarantees: it holds the shared TELOS lock, copies the file to `Backups/<name>.dashboard-<stamp>` first, logs the change, and refuses any edit inside an AUTOMATED region.
• Advice and analysis rest on the TELOS or project files as they are now, read in this run, and every claim traces to a file; nothing comes from cached knowledge.
• A project analysis surfaces the dependency chains PROBLEMS→GOALS→STRATEGIES→PROJECTS, the bottlenecks, alignment with stated objectives, progress and risk areas, delivered in the format asked for: report, narrative, dashboard, JSON or executive summary.
• Personal TELOS never leaves the private tree: it is never included in public repos, skills, or outputs. Project material may be sensitive, so it is shared outward only with the principal's yes, sensitive details are redacted in examples, and individual names are reduced to roles in anything board-facing.

Intent Routing

| Intent | Trigger | File | |----------|---------|------| | **Update** | "add to TELOS", "add to ideal state", "update my goals", "add book to TELOS" | `Intents/Update.md` | | **InterviewExtraction** | "extract content", "extract telos content", "extract interviews", "analyze interviews" | `Intents/InterviewExtraction.md` | | **CreateNarrativePoints** | "create narrative", "narrative points", "TELOS report", "n=24" | `Intents/CreateNarrativePoints.md` | | **WriteReport** | "write report", "McKinsey report", "create TELOS report", "professional report" | `Intents/WriteReport.md` |

General project analysis, dashboards, dependency mapping and executive summaries have no intent file; the skill handles them directly (§ Project TELOS Analysis, § Building Dashboards).

| User Request | Context | Location | |--------------|---------|----------| | "my TELOS", "my goals", "my beliefs", "add to TELOS" | Personal TELOS | `~/.claude/LIFEOS/USER/TELOS/` | | "analyze [project]", "dashboard for" | Project TELOS | User-specified directory | | "analyze ~/path/to/project" | Project TELOS | Specified path |

| File | Read when | |------|-----------| | `DashboardTemplate/` | building a project dashboard: the shipped Next.js scaffold, with copy-and-run steps in its README | | `ReportTemplate/` | WriteReport copies it as the report app (components, styles, placeholder `lib/report-data.ts`) | | `Setup.md` | first-time setup: the TELOS files, and the optional report theme (`ReportTheme.ts`, `Fonts/`) |

Data & Config

All personal TELOS files live at `~/.claude/LIFEOS/USER/TELOS/`, in the USER tree, not under the Telos skill directory. `updates.md` is the changelog of every TELOS update and `Backups/` holds the timestamped backups. The optional report theme (`ReportTheme.ts`, `Fonts/`, `PREFERENCES.md` § Report design) lives at `<configRoot>/LIFEOS/USER/CUSTOMIZATIONS/SKILLS/Telos/`. Setup: [Setup.md](Setup.md).

An install that keeps TELOS unified holds the categories as H2 sections of `TELOS.md`, including the Ideal State and Current State sections, and its updates target `TELOS.md` with `--section`. The machine-owned AUTOMATED regions inside the Current State and Ideal State sections change only through `--region current|ideal` (Update.md § Tool contract). An install may also keep per-domain `IDEAL_STATE/` and `CURRENT_STATE/` directories beside it; the Update tool cannot write those (Update.md § Gotchas).

The split-file taxonomy below is the canonical file list, and the Update tool's `VALID_FILES` validates file names against it. A fresh install's starter scaffold ships a subset, and the tool creates a valid file on first write.

| Group | Files | |-------|-------| | Core philosophy | **TELOS.md** (main framework document), **MISSION.md**, **BELIEFS.md** (core beliefs and world model), **WISDOM.md** | | Life data | **BOOKS.md**, *