ARIS

Most AI chat sessions are goldfish — everything learned dies when the window closes. ARIS(Adaptive Reasoning & Intelligence System) is a personal assistant built on Claude Code that doesn't forget: its long-term memory is a wikilinked Obsidian vault, its behavior is enforced by lifecycle hooks, and its reach — email, calendar, GitHub, even parametric CAD — comes from MCP servers. Every session starts warm: an auto-loaded index tells the agent who it's working for, what's in flight, and which rules apply. Context compounds instead of resetting.

The vault is the single source of truth — eleven top-level folders covering projects, people, courses, daily logs, and maps of content, all cross-linked with wikilinks. On top of it sits an index-and-backing split: MEMORY.md holds one-line pointers and loads into context at session start; each fact lives in its own note with typed frontmatter, read only when relevant. The index stays lean on purpose — recall is a lookup, not a dump.

Two custom skills close the loop between conversation and knowledge. /save is the end-of-session sync: it triages quick captures into their canonical notes, appends the daily log, re-statuses an Active-Threads heartbeat, audits standing notes for stale facts, and verifies every wikilink it wrote resolves. /brief is a review-gated morning digest — it pulls two email sources (Gmail, plus desktop Outlook over a COM bridge), proposes vault entries, and writes nothing without approval.

One rule is absolute: processed notes are paraphrases, so original captures are moved to an archive tree — never deleted. The raw text stays the primary source forever.

An agent with filesystem access needs more than good intentions — it needs mechanisms that hold even when the model is wrong.

The same MCP discipline documented in Calendar MCP applies across the bridges: explicit tool names, undo where mutation exists, and trust boundaries kept at the process level. ARIS is less a single program than an operating agreement between a model, a filesystem, and the hooks that keep them honest.