personal-config

A terminal wizard that sets up an agent-driven working style in your repos. It asks a short list of questions (who runs git commit, which model runs which work, where work is written down) and writes a matching set of files: a working standard, a ledger and a board, per-language code conventions, and the rules your coding agent reads before it touches anything. It scans each repo first and shapes the output to what it finds there.

Nothing is written until you have seen the whole file tree and confirmed it, and anything a run overwrites is backed up first. personal-config undo puts the last run’s files back, once. Your answers stay on your machine. The two network calls the tool can make are listed under the control guarantees below.

Why

If you use a coding agent for more than one session, you spend the start of every session re-explaining what you already decided. This tool writes the documents that stop that: a ledger of what is true, a board of what is next, and one standard that describes how work is scoped, sized, handed off and closed out. The documents are the point. The tool writes a first draft of them for your repo.

Requirements

Node 20 or newer. The published package is one bundled file (dist/cli.js) plus one runtime dependency, @clack/prompts, so Bun is not needed to run it. CI installs the packed tarball with npm on Node 20, 22 and 24, on a machine with no Bun, and runs typecheck, lint, tests and doctor on Linux and macOS.

The hook scripts are bash, so on Windows they need WSL or Git Bash. The two guards (commit-guard.sh and delete-guard.sh) read the command with jq when it is installed. Without jq they fall back to a stricter match that can refuse more than they should. Everything else the wizard writes is plain text and works anywhere Node does.

npx personal-config setup

Run npx personal-config with nothing after it in a terminal, and it always opens a home screen. What the screen offers depends on where you are. A machine with nothing saved is asked to set up: first the global setup for your machine, then the profile manager. A folder not yet set up is offered setup, and a set-up folder is offered its check, its next board item and its standard changes. No screen shows more than six rows, and Other… holds the rest. In a pipe or a script the command prints the help text. setup, global and profile draw the same full-screen frame in a terminal, and --yes keeps them plain.

bunx personal-config setup works the same way. To install it once and run it by name in any folder, install it globally with npm:

npm install -g personal-config

To run from a clone, which is also how you run this repo’s own tests, install Bun 1.2.9 or newer:

git clone https://github.com/zach-short/personal-config
cd personal-config
bun install
bun run setup