eidola

Persona packaging convention and Claude Code plugin for creating simulacra from personal data.

The Idea

Your conversations, writings, emails, bookmarks, photos, and voice memos — all exported to arkiv format — contain enough signal to create a conversable echo of you. eidola defines how to package that data as a persona, and provides Claude Code skills to generate one.

How It Works

A persona directory is a Claude Code project:

persona/
├── README.md              # Self-describing (ECHO compliant)
├── CLAUDE.md              # System prompt (personality, voice, values)
├── .mcp.json              # Dual arkiv MCP (person's data + memory)
├── provenance.json        # Consent and authorization record
├── evaluation.md          # Fidelity assessment and calibration notes
├── arkiv/                 # Person's data (immutable)
│   ├── data.db            #   arkiv SQLite (queryable via MCP)
│   ├── README.md          #   Self-describing archive metadata
│   ├── schema.yaml        #   Curated metadata schema (optional)
│   ├── corpus/            #   Source JSONL (canonical)
│   └── media/             #   Audio clips, images
├── portrait/              # Synthesized understanding (generated markdown)
│   └── *.md               #   Freeform narrative files
└── memory/                # Simulacrum's experience (mutable)
    ├── conversations.jsonl #   Append-only conversation logs
    └── data.db            #   Queryable memory (separate arkiv instance)
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To talk to the simulacrum:

cd persona/
claude
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Claude loads the system prompt from CLAUDE.md, connects to the person’s data via arkiv MCP, and speaks in their voice — grounded in their actual conversations, writings, and memories.

Graceful Degradation

1. Full — Claude Code + dual arkiv MCP + portrait/ + memory. Interactive simulacrum with deep understanding, memory retrieval, and session continuity.
2. Good — Any LLM + CLAUDE.md + portrait/ files as context. No live data retrieval, but rich understanding from the portrait.
3. Minimal — Read CLAUDE.md as a text file. Compact personality description.
4. Archival — README.md explains everything. All data in durable formats (text, JSONL, SQLite, markdown).

Plugin Skills

Install eidola as a Claude Code plugin, then:

• /eidola-interview — Claude interviews you to elicit personality data
• /eidola-generate — Create a persona from arkiv data
• /eidola-evaluate — Test the simulacrum’s fidelity
• /eidola-refresh — Update CLAUDE.md when new data arrives
• /eidola-validate — Check a persona directory against the spec
• /eidola-info — Inspect a persona

Dependencies

• arkiv — Data layer (JSONL, SQLite, MCP server)
• Claude Code — Intelligence layer

Spec

See SPEC.md for the full persona directory convention.

Related

• arkiv — Universal personal data format
• longecho — ECHO compliance validator
• memex, mtk, btk, ptk, ebk — Source toolkits (producers of arkiv data)

“The ghost is not you. But it echoes you.”