Personal Codex Vault

Personal Codex Vault is a GitHub template repository created by Jason Liu (jxnl) that provides a structured workspace for giving OpenAI Codex persistent, durable context. It acts as a shared-memory vault where Codex can look up information before acting and write back important context after user approval. The template was published in June 2026 as an early-stage, actively developed project.

What It Is

Personal Codex Vault is a monorepo scaffold designed to serve as the long-term memory layer for Codex-powered AI workflows. Rather than starting each Codex session from scratch, users clone this template as ~/vault and point a Codex project at it. The repo then becomes the canonical store for project notes, collaborator profiles, repo-local skills, and writing-style memory that Codex can read and update over time.

Repository Structure

The template organizes context into clearly scoped directories:

• projects/ — long-lived active work
• experiments/ — short-lived spikes and proofs of concept
• people/ — notes about collaborators and agents
• .codex/skills/ — repo-local skill definitions Codex can invoke
• templates/ — starter files for new entries
• tests/ — checks for template integrity

Onboarding Workflow

Setup is designed to be a single command. After cloning the template and creating a Codex project rooted at ~/vault, users trigger onboarding by running the onboard-me command in a new thread. The onboarding skill then:

• Reads the workspace and asks what projects and people matter
• Checks for missing plugins (Gmail, Slack, GitHub, Google Drive, Browser, and others)
• Offers thread automations for recurring checks, defaulting to 9:00 AM and 4:00 PM check-ins
• Bootstraps a write-like-me skill from sent Slack and email writing
• Proactively proposes people/*.md, project packets, and AGENTS.md updates

Codex is instructed to ask before sending messages, editing shared docs, creating automations, or writing shared memory.

Built-in Skills

Repo-local skills live under .codex/skills/ and cover the most common recurring workflows:

• onboarding — first-time setup
• assistant — ongoing work support after onboarding
• loop — recurring checks on a thread
• new-project — scaffold a new project or experiment
• new-person — create a person note
• write-like-me-bootstrap — generate a personal writing-style skill from Slack and email history

Release And Licensing

The repository reached its initial tagged release at v0.1.1, published on June 15, 2026, the same day the earlier v0.1.0 tag landed, indicating active early-stage development. No license file is present in the repository at this time, so no formal open-source terms are declared.