last_edited	2026-06-15

Personal Monorepo

Starter workspace for Codex.

Canonical repo: jxnl/personal-monorepo-template.

This template gives Codex a place to look before it acts:

• projects/ for active work
• experiments/ for short spikes
• people/ for collaborators and agents
• .codex/skills/ for repo-local skills

This repo is also the Assistant shared-memory vault. Onboarding should update this repo in place; it should not create a nested vault/ directory or a separate ~/vault unless you explicitly choose a different location.

Install

Create your vault from the template:

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/jxnl/personal-monorepo-template.git vault
cd vault
rm -rf .git
git init

That gives you:

~/vault

This repo is the vault. Do not create a second vault/ directory inside it.

If you do not want to think about the setup, press Cmd+Cmd to open Codex and say: Set me up with jxnl/personal-monorepo-template as ~/vault.

Set Up Codex

1. Open Codex.
2. Install the plugins you actually use.
3. Create a new Codex project rooted at ~/vault.
4. Create a new thread in that project.
5. Say:

$onboard me

Plugins To Install First

Install plugins before onboarding so Assistant can read the right context.

Start with the tools where your work happens:

• Assistant
• Gmail or Outlook Email
• Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar
• Google Drive, Notion, Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations, or PDF
• Slack or Teams
• GitHub, Linear, or Notion for project tracking
• Browser
• Chrome
• Computer Use

For Chrome workflows, install the Chrome plugin and the Codex Chrome Extension.

What Onboarding Does

Onboarding should explain what it is checking before it checks it.

It should:

• read the workspace
• ask what projects exist and what matters
• ask who Codex should know about
• check whether useful plugins are missing
• offer thread automations for recurring checks
• offer a daily update monitor, people monitor, and project monitors where useful, defaulting to 9:00 AM and 4:00 PM check-ins in your timezone
• offer shared-memory setup by using this repo as the vault
• proactively propose people/*.md, project packets, and AGENTS.md updates after scanning connected Slack, email, calendar, docs, project trackers, and GitHub context

Assistant should ask before sending messages, changing meetings, editing shared docs, creating automations, creating, pinning, renaming, or looping threads, installing plugins, or writing shared memory.

Skills

Repo-local skills live under .codex/skills/.

Useful starting points:

• onboarding: first setup
• assistant: ongoing work support after onboarding
• loop: recurring checks on a thread
• new-project: create a project or experiment
• new-person: create a person note

Structure

• projects/: long-lived work
• experiments/: short-lived spikes
• people/: notes about people or agents
• .codex/: skills, plugin metadata, and assets
• templates/: starter files
• tests/: checks for template integrity