wtf is a
walnut?

walnut

The unit of context.

Any meaningful thing with its own identity, history, and knowledge. A project, a person, a venture, an experiment, a life goal. Each walnut has a _kernel/ folder with three files: key.md (identity), log.md (history), insights.md (standing knowledge). That's the walnut. A folder with structure.

analogy
.git is to your code what .alive is to your context. A walnut is one repo in that world.

squirrel

The agent runtime.

The behavioral layer that wraps any AI model. It reads your context, captures decisions, routes information, saves state. The squirrel is portable — Claude today, GPT tomorrow, local model next week. The agent is replaceable. The runtime persists. The walnut is permanent.

analogy
The JVM runs Java on any machine. The squirrel runs ALIVE on any model.

stash

Your running list of things worth keeping.

Decisions, tasks, notes. Captured in conversation as you work. Lives in chat until you save — then routes to the right walnut. If a decision was made, it goes in the stash. If a task emerged, stash. If someone said something worth keeping, stash. At save time, you confirm what stays and where it goes.

analogy
Git has a staging area. ALIVE has a stash. Both hold things between 'noticed' and 'committed.'

bundle

A self-contained unit of work inside a walnut.

Has a context.manifest.yaml (the scannable index), optional tasks, optional raw sources. Two species: outcome bundles produce something specific (a deliverable). Evergreen bundles accumulate context over time (a collection). When a bundle outgrows its walnut, it graduates into its own walnut.

analogy
If a walnut is a repo, a bundle is a feature branch with its own README.

save

Checkpoint. Route the stash. Update state.

Not a file save. A save routes everything the stash collected into the right walnut files — decisions become log entries, tasks get tracked, insights get committed. The projection script runs, now.json regenerates, and the next session boots with full context. Save can happen multiple times per session.

analogy
Git commit + push, but for your decisions, not your code.

kernel

The system files inside every walnut.

The _kernel/ folder. Contains key.md (what it is), log.md (what happened), insights.md (what's known), tasks.json (what needs doing), now.json (computed current state). These are the three files the squirrel reads before responding about any walnut.

analogy
The kernel in an OS manages resources. The kernel in a walnut manages context.

now.json

The current state snapshot. Computed, never hand-edited.

Generated by project.py after every save. Reads all source files — log entries, bundle manifests, task data, squirrel entries — and assembles one JSON snapshot. The squirrel reads this at session start to know: what phase, what's next, what bundles are active, what tasks are open. It's the projection of everything.

analogy
A database view. Derived from source tables. Always up to date. Never edited directly.

world

Your ALIVE folder. Everything lives here.

The root directory containing your walnuts, organized by the ALIVE framework: 01_Archive, 02_Life, 03_Inbox, 04_Ventures, 05_Experiments. Plain files. On your disk. Yours forever. Nothing phones home.

analogy
Your home directory, but structured for an AI to navigate and a human to own.