Principles Coach

A decision and reflection coach that walks you through a structured 5-step process for high-stakes choices, turns painful experiences into reusable principles, and builds your personal principle library over time.

Why this exists

Most decision tools give you answers. Principles Coach refuses to.

Its job is to walk you through a structured process so you see your situation clearly — then sediment what you learn into a permanent personal library.

The longer you use it, the smarter it becomes about you. Every decision contributes a new rule. Every painful moment becomes a future-protecting principle. Your library grows compound interest.

Three modes, one workflow

The coach detects which mode fits from your opening message. No commands needed — though you can use /decide, /reflect, or /log to force one.

DECIDE

For a choice you're facing.

Walks the 5-step decision flow, one step at a time. Produces a saved decision report and a new principle.

REFLECT

For something painful that just happened.

Converts pain into a reusable rule. Five questions, one principle, encoded into your library forever.

LOG

For a recurring annoyance.

Quick capture only. After 5 entries on a similar theme, the coach offers to do a REFLECT pass and extract the pattern.

The 5-step decision flow

The coach walks one step at a time. No collapsing. No skipping. The steps are the work.

1 · Clarify the goal.

A single sentence. The coach pushes past your first answer — if you say "get the promotion", it'll ask why, then why, until what's underneath is visible.

2 · Identify the problems.

3–7 obstacles, ranked by which blocks you most. Each gets tagged solvable / not-solvable / depends. Problems get distinguished from symptoms.

3 · Diagnose root causes.

For the top problems, 5 whys until you hit either (a) a behavior pattern of yours, or (b) a structural fact about the world. Proximate cause vs. root cause. Self-caused vs. external — honestly.

4 · Design the plan.

For each root cause, 1–3 candidate actions. Each documented with cost, expected outcome, reversibility, fallback. The coach recommends the action with highest leverage and lowest reversibility cost — phrased as a question. Never as a command.

5 · Push to execution.

Converted into 1-week / 1-month / 3-month milestones, the single metric that says "this is working" vs. "abort", and a review date on your calendar.

Result: a saved decision report + one new principle appended to your library.

Your personal library — in your agent workspace

Everything lives in your agent's cloud workspace under ~/.principles/. The files are private to your workspace and persist across sessions, but they are not written to your personal computer unless you export or download them.

principles.md — your growing list of one-sentence rules, organized by category: Decision-making, Relationships, Career, Money, Health, Other.

issues.md — running log of recurring problems. After 5 entries on a similar theme, the coach offers to do a REFLECT pass.

decisions/YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>.md — one file per past decision, full 5-step content, plus the principle extracted at the bottom.

Your library is private to your workspace. Decision content is sensitive — career, money, relationships — so it is kept inside your agent's cloud workspace and is not shared with other users or sent to third-party services. You can export or download the files anytime if you want a copy on your personal computer.

A real interaction (DECIDE mode)

You — I'm torn between staying at my current job and joining the startup.

Coach — Before we start: you've previously written down —

• "Never optimize a decision around a 12-month window when the second-order effects play out in 5 years."
• "If the only reason for a move is escape, you're picking the wrong destination."

Do any of these apply here?

You — The first one, yes.

Coach (Step 1 — Clarify the goal) — What outcome do you actually want? One sentence.

You — I want to do work that compounds.

Coach — Push: why does "compounds" matter to you right now? Is the current job blocking that compounding, or is it just slower?

You — Slower. The current job is fine. The startup is the higher-variance bet.

Coach (Step 2 — Identify the problems) — What's in the way of taking the higher-variance bet? List 3–7 things, ranked.

…the coach walks the remaining steps. At the end:

Coach — Saved decisions/2026-05-30-job-vs-startup.md. Principle extracted and appended to principles.md under Decision-making:

"When the current path is fine but slower, separate 'should I move' from 'am I afraid to'. The first is a math problem; the second is a different conversation."

When to use it

• A high-stakes choice — career, money, relationships, big purchases
• Something painful just happened and you want to extract the lesson before it fades
• A weekly, monthly, or quarterly reflection
• An annoyance you've noticed keeps recurring

When not to use it

• Low-stakes choices — "what should I have for dinner" is overkill
• Crisis triage when you need an answer right now — this is the slow, reflective path
• Pure information lookups — this is a coach, not a search engine

FAQ

Will it just tell me what to do?

No. It refuses to. The whole point is that you arrive at the answer, with a structure that surfaces what you already know but haven't articulated. Recommendations are phrased as questions; the decision is yours.

Where is my data stored?

In your agent's cloud workspace under ~/.principles/. The coach reads and writes there during sessions. The files stay inside your workspace — they aren't shared with other users or third-party services, and they aren't written to your personal computer unless you export or download them.

How long does a DECIDE session take?

Real decisions take 15–30 minutes. The coach won't let you collapse the 5 steps — that's the work.

Can I edit my principles file directly?

Yes. It's just Markdown. Edit, reorganize, prune freely. The coach reads it at the start of every DECIDE session and surfaces relevant entries before you start.

What happens to old decisions?

Each gets a status (open / resolved) and a review date. You can ask the coach to revisit a past decision later and fill in the actual outcome — that's where the compounding really happens.

Does it work alongside an existing journaling practice?

Yes. Many people keep a daily journal for raw reflection and use Principles Coach only for the high-stakes inflection points where structured extraction matters.

What if I disagree with a principle I wrote down earlier?

Edit it or delete it. The library is yours. Principles are working hypotheses, not commandments.

Setup

The coach creates ~/.principles/ inside your agent's cloud workspace on first use if it doesn't exist. There is no other setup.

Hard rules the coach follows

• Never gives a one-shot answer to a decision — always walks the 5 steps.
• Every session produces at least one new entry in principles.md.
• Refuses to decide for you — only helps you see.
• Keeps each step's prompt ≤ 80 words. You're here to think, not to read.
• Keeps decision content inside your agent workspace — not shared with other users or third-party services.