Methodology

What "AI Constitution" means

An AI Constitution is a single authored document that governs how AI tools behave inside one person's working environment. The unified model is:

• A single Constitution.md contains all sections: universal operating rules, technical work, prose and writing, and personal rules for each domain.
• Domain-specific sections (§4 Technical Work, §5 Prose & Writing) live inside the unified file rather than as separate files.
• Hooks and skills are fetched from ai-atoms.com on install — the binary ships only infrastructure.

What this product adds

The prose stack is good for one expert author who already knows what rules they want. It is impassable for anyone else: there is no on-ramp, no maintenance loop, no portable identity, no way to recover the system on a new machine without an act of memory.

ai turns the prose stack into a product:

1. Onboarding. ai setup launches a guided interview that produces a personalized Constitution.md without the assistant fabricating rules.
2. Maintenance. ai review watches ~/.ai/memory/ for patterns and proposes amendments back into Constitution.md. You approve. You don't scribe.
3. Portability. ai sync + ai restore move the whole tree — memories, audit records, hook topology, symlink wiring — to and from a user-owned remote. One command for a fresh laptop.
4. Self-repair. ai doctor fixes broken symlinks, missing hooks, dirty trees, divergent HEAD, stale binary. No conversation needed.
5. Atoms. Personas, profiles, skills, brand identity — versioned, immutable, content-hashed. Drift becomes structurally impossible.
6. Cross-tool enforcement. The command-wrapper facade makes the same hooks fire whether Claude Code, Copilot CLI, Cursor, or a human shell session ran the command.

What it explicitly is not

• Not a multi-tenant SaaS. Each user's ~/.ai/ is theirs.
• Not a replacement for the prose files. They remain authoritative.
• Not a model wrapper. This is the configuration plane around whatever agent you already run.
• Not a secrets store. Secrets live in OS keychains, vaults, or env files.

Honest about defense-in-depth

The command-wrapper facade is a defense-in-depth measure, not a security control. A bypass via absolute path (/usr/bin/git) or PATH override is always possible. The wrapper's value is catching the common case and producing an audit signal where one would normally appear — so a missing audit line is itself visible. We say this in the wrapper's first-run message because honesty about what a guardrail can't do is part of what makes the rest of the system trustworthy.

Read the spec for the full implementation surface.