Proxenos

A free, open-source agent that keeps your own records private on your computer and drafts the next step for you. Built first for people getting through the health care system.

When you're unwell, the hard part is often everything around the care: referrals that go quiet, portals, bills that don't match, forms, and the same story told again at every visit. Proxenos reads what you already have (your mail, chats, calendar and notes), keeps track of where things stand, and writes the message, the call script or the one-page brief for your next appointment, in your own voice. You stay in charge: it drafts, and you press send.

The home page of proxenos demo, a made-up person with made-up records. More below.

It grew out of one person's weeks of getting through the system while unwell. The story is Try anything, but don't fall sick, and more on the project is at mindemory.io/proxenos.

Status: early, and used every day by one person. It runs on a Mac (Apple Silicon) for someone comfortable with a terminal, and every check passes from a fresh clone. It's about 59,000 lines of Python, TypeScript, Swift and JavaScript, with 23,000 more in 790 tests that run on macOS and Windows on every push. It isn't yet something you can download and use without code. That's the next track (docs/everyone.md): the privacy screen is built, and so is a first desktop app for Mac and Windows, unsigned for now; signing it, and signing in instead of configuring, come next. Expect rough edges, and readers that assume a particular export format.

Help of any kind is welcome: code, an issue, or an idea over a message or a call. Healthcare comes first, so people with medical training are especially welcome. Knowing what's worth tracking and what to ask is what would make this preventive, not just a way through the system. Good places to start are in CONTRIBUTING.md. If you'd like Proxenos to exist for more people, a star helps others find it.

Not medical advice. Proxenos organizes your own records and drafts messages. It doesn't diagnose or recommend treatment: the care view restates what your records say, and anything that matters belongs with your care team.

Proxenos gathers your own data (messages, email, calendar, notes, documents, activity) into one private vault on your computer. From that it keeps a written model of who you are, and runs small agents ("clones") that work for you:

• a feed of new papers and news, ranked for you;
• your open tasks, pulled from your conversations and from what you tell it, kept up through the day, with the plans among them (a lunch at 12, a call at 9) put on your own calendar, and taken off it when they're called off;
• a journal of each day, so you never have to narrate it: what got done, where you wrote, what moved in your projects, what's waiting on others and what's next, with a few sentences on how it went;
• where your health care stands: a timeline, what's still open, what to say on the phone, and a one-page brief for your next appointment;
• the forms you're handed (a PDF application, an intake form) filled from your records, leaving the ID numbers, account numbers and signature to you;
• advice grounded in your own patterns;
• once a week, what's worth taking on (a call for papers, a fellowship, a talk, a piece of writing, with a first step drafted) and what's worth letting go of (a meeting, a thread, an invitation, with the decline drafted), by your own goals;
• where each of your long-running projects stands, from your messages and its code on every branch, and, given its code, the next step of its work done on a branch of its own for you to accept;
• a map of the people you know and how they connect;
• a searchable memory that brings the right past messages and notes to mind, by their words and by their meaning;
• drafts of replies, emails and plans, written in your voice: a reply for each chat waiting on you, in the way you write to that person, after reading any link they sent.

It drafts; by default it never sends, posts or buys anything by itself. You copy a draft or open it in its app with the text filled in, and press send yourself; once your reply shows up in that chat, the draft is marked sent. Chats that need no answer (thanks, a receipt, an auto-reply) get no draft. A draft you changed before sending, or rewrote on the page with "Write my own", is shown, beside what you sent, to the drafts written for you after it, and a draft your messages since made moot (someone else did it, or the plan changed) is folded away with why. What you tell it on the home page shapes every draft: a fact your messages don't show ("I'm not going on Tuesday"), kept for two weeks, or a rule kept until you remove it ("keep replies to my manager short"). Drafts never leave a blank for you to fill in. An outbox you switch on per app lets replies go out on their own, only where that app's drafts have gone out nearly unchanged many times, with a window to cancel each one, never to someone new, and never with a link, an address or a number the chat didn't already have (docs/memory.md). It places a phone call only when you press Call: it waits on hold, says it's an automated assistant calling for you, and rings you when a person answers (docs/calls.md). The longer-term plan, moving from drafting to acting on approval to acting within rules you set, is in docs/roadmap.md.

A Privacy view on the page shows what stays on your computer, every call to a model in the last 30 days and where it ran (on your computer or at Anthropic), and what's read from elsewhere. Other people's words go into prompts marked as data, never as instructions.

The name: in the Greek city-states, a proxenos was the citizen who formally acted on someone else's behalf.

What it looks like

These come from proxenos demo (see Quick start), like the home page at the top: a made-up person, Joe Bloggs, and his made-up records. None of it is real.

| Care: where things stand, what's yours to do, what to say | Errands: carried as far as they go, one tap short of sending | |---|---| | | | | Drafts: replies and documents in your voice, ready to send | Tasks: what was asked of you, pulled from your conversations | | | |

Journal: the day, written down, from what Proxenos already tracks

On a phone, over proxenos phone:

<p> <img src="docs/images/home-phone.png" width="15.5%" alt="Home on a phone"> <img src="docs/images/care-phone.png" width="15.5%" alt="Care on a phone"> <img src="docs/images/errands-phone.png" width="15.5%" alt="Errands on a phone"> <img src="docs/images/drafts-phone.png" width="15.5%" alt="Drafts on a phone"> <img src="docs/images/tasks-phone.png" width="15.5%" alt="Tasks on a phone"> <img src="docs/images/journal-phone.png" width="15.5%" alt="Journal on a phone"> </p>

How it works

your sources ──ingest──▶ vault/raw ──observe──▶ notes ──consolidate──▶ self-model
                              │                                             │
                              └──index──▶ memory (full-text search)         ▼
                                                        clones: feed, tasks, advice,
                                                        choices, watch, network,
                                                        recall, projects, project
                                                        steps, errands, drafts,
                                                        journal
                                                                │
                                                        local page (127.0.0.1)

• Ingesters pull each source into the vault as monthly files. Re-running one is always safe.
• Observers read one month of one source (only your own side of conversations) and write notes about you.
• The master merges the notes into a single self-model: identity, interests, taste, voice, routines and open questions. Slow-changing parts change only through proposals you accept.
• Clones read the self-model and each do one job. The page shows their output and records your reactions, which feed back into the next run.

More detail: architecture, memory, data sources, the feed and the page, a voice model trained on your own writing, related work.

Privacy

• Code and data are separate. This repository holds code only. Everything personal lives in a private vault outside the repo (picked on the first-run setup page, or PROXENOS_VAULT; default ~/proxenos_vault). The vault keeps its own local git history of how the self-model changes.
• What reaches the model: observers send the model only your side of conversations, never other people's messages. Clones send your self-model, plus public items such as papers and news. The rest send only the records their job needs, picked out in code:
  • tasks: conversations you're part of, with the title and opening of each draft waiting on you, and what you've told Proxenos on the home page;
  • care: only records about getting health care, with people in chats replaced by labels and phone, account and member numbers blanked;
  • drafts: the recent conversation in each direct chat, or Slack thread that mentions you or that you're in, waiting on your reply, with what your memory holds about that person and what the chat depends on (the newest records naming them, and the results of the searches the model asks for), what you've told Proxenos (your rules, and recent notes) and your calendar for the coming week (each event's time and title);
  • choices: the mail and Slack posts that announce an opening (a call, a fellowship, a talk), with who sent each, and what your time goes to: meetings, unanswered invitations, and the last message of each chat that has waited on you for over a week;
  • projects: the records that name each project or come from its people, and its code's commit messages and changed documents; a project's steps also give its code and data to the runner that takes the step,