Zanmai (三昧) is Japanese for being completely absorbed in one thing. You never get there while part of you is holding twenty others in place.
A folder on your machine that AI can actually work in. You throw things in, it files them. You ask in your own words, it answers from your own material. It builds new things out of what is already there.
Everything in it opens in any editor, with or without this. The AI is Claude, through Claude Code.
The folders are named after what is going on rather than what stage a file is at, so the right one is obvious and nothing has to move later. Everything about one matter stays together in it, whatever the file type, because sorting by type would cut apart the very thing you were keeping. How the vault is organised · why it is built this way.
What comes out
- Documents in your own design: it measures the templates you already use and builds in that language. Print-ready PDF, or PowerPoint and Affinity to keep editing.
- Text written for its purpose: minutes from a recording, a handover, copy for a page. It settles what the document is used for before the first sentence, asks if that is not findable, and gives you the points without a frame, a derivation or advice on how to run your own meeting.
- A finished cut: footage and your notes in, a video out, with captions and levelled sound. Delete a paragraph from the transcript and exactly that leaves the video.
- A summary of a video: it reads the picture as well, so what is only on a slide still lands in the text.
- Research you can check: real sources, cited only where it actually read them.
- Images: generated through Higgsfield or Magnific, or edited on your own machine for free.
What it does with what you have
- Anything you drop in gets filed, in whatever state it arrives.
- A photo of a business card becomes a contact, a booking confirmation a note with the real dates in it.
- Speak instead of typing: turned into text on your own machine, nothing uploaded.
- Ask instead of remembering: it searches everything, including inside files your editor cannot open.
- One matter stays in one folder: note, PDF, photo and recording together.
- Your brand comes out of your own material: colour, type and tone read off a logo and an old document, kept in one file, so a document, an image and a video look like the same company.
- Specialists instead of one model for everything, each on a model you pick.
- It tells you what is waiting without being asked: what came in, what has sat on your desk for weeks.
- Nothing is ever deleted, and you can pull a single file out of an earlier state of the vault.
- Reaches what is outside: the sources you hooked up yourself.
- Updates never touch your own material.
Three things, with a command for each. Homebrew comes from brew.sh; winget
ships with Windows 10 and 11 already, or get it from the Microsoft
Store if it is missing.
| what you need | macOS | Windows (PowerShell) |
|---|---|---|
| Python 3.10 or newer | brew install python |
winget install Python.Python.3.12 |
| Git | brew install git |
winget install Git.Git |
| Claude Code | brew install --cask claude-code |
winget install Anthropic.ClaudeCode |
On Linux, install Python and git with your package manager and Claude Code with
curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash, which also works on macOS. Without Homebrew or
winget, take Python from python.org, ticking "Add python.exe to
PATH" on Windows, and install Claude Code with irm https://claude.ai/install.ps1 | iex there.
Optional: Node.js for connected features such as image generation. Anything else a job needs,
Zanmai names with its size and fetches on your go, and zanmai.py tools list shows the whole set at
any time: what each one is for, how big it is, and whether it is already on your machine. Nothing is
installed from a question you cannot see the contents of.
What gets installed ·
requirements and installation.
Clone it where your vault should live, then start a session in that folder. The archive works too, and updates run either way.
git clone https://github.com/TomSchimana/Zanmai.git
cd Zanmai
claudeSay hello in your own language and setup starts. When it finishes, close the session and open a new one: that is when the guards load.
From then on you ask instead of reading. "Show me everything I can do with Zanmai" is a good first
line. End the day with /zanmai-close-session so the next one picks up where you left off.
If the approval prompts get tiring, press Shift+Tab and pick auto mode. Zanmai's own guards keep
working, so nothing gets less safe.
You do not have to read any of it. The documentation ships inside Zanmai and asking is the intended way in: "how do I import a folder", "what happens when I update". The answer comes from these same pages, in your language and shaped to your vault. It also reads fine here on GitHub.
None yet, so all rights are reserved and redistributing or building on it is not permitted at this stage; what Zanmai itself builds on is named in credits.