5. Core Concepts, Made Simple¶
A few ideas make everything else click. None of them are technical — they're just how BOB thinks.
The vault is your company's brain¶
Everything BOB knows about your business lives in the vault: plain, readable files on your own machine, organised into a stable structure — clients, company divisions, resources, personal notes. This has three consequences that matter:
- No lock-in. Your data is files. You can read, move, back up, or leave with them at any time.
- Context compounds. Every meeting note, decision, and deliverable you keep makes the next answer sharper.
- One fact, one home. Each kind of information has exactly one place to live, so nothing is lost and nothing is duplicated. BOB routes new notes to the right place automatically.
Skills are workflows, not prompts¶
A skill is a written procedure: what inputs it needs, what steps it takes, what checks it applies, what "done" looks like. Because the procedure is written down, results are repeatable — the tenth proposal follows the same quality bar as the first, and improvements to a skill benefit every future run.
Playbooks chain skills into processes¶
Where a skill is one job, a playbook is a process — onboarding a client, closing a month, running a weekly review. Playbooks execute step by step with checkpoints, and each run is logged: what was invoked, with what input, producing which files. You can retrace what BOB did after the fact.
The rules BOB never breaks¶
| Rule | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| 1. Your source material is sacred | Files you wrote are never silently overwritten or deleted |
| 2. Nothing risky without a "go" | Sending, publishing, deleting, paying — anything hard to undo waits for your explicit approval. Drafts flow freely. |
| 3. Big builds get a plan first | For anything beyond routine, BOB shows you a plan to approve before starting |
The short version: BOB works draft-first. It creates freely, but you are always the one who presses "send".
You choose the AI model¶
The model is layer 4 — swappable without touching your vault, skills, or habits.
| Choose | When |
|---|---|
| Claude (default) | Best all-round quality for business reasoning and writing |
| Lighter/cheaper variants | Simple drafts and routine work where cost matters |
| A local model | Content whose AI processing must stay on your machine. It does not cover skills that call outside services or skills fetched from the skills server (see chapter 19) |
BOB gets better as your vault matures¶
- Week 1: competent but generic answers; more clarifying questions
- Month 1: answers tailored to your business — profile, clients, and processes are in place
- Month 3+: BOB references your past decisions, prior client work, and your writing style
The vault is a flywheel: the more you work in it, the smarter every future answer becomes.