A catalogued library for parents to maintain and deepen their knowledge about their kids, plus a daily newspaper to help those kids learn skills, stay on top of chores, and get a daily taste of culture.
The Kid Vault — a library that keeps everything
you know about your child organized, synthesized, and ready for you to use. This is an extremely flexible system that can be used for all kinds of things that you dream up. If you have a child with complicated medical or developmental issues, this can help you store what you know and what you're learning, and help reduce some of that mental load.
You can also use it for fun applications like:
The Kid Gazette — a daily printed newspaper that lands in the printer tray when your kid is ready for it. Personalized household missions, cultural tidbits, a daily checklist, and a points system. Can run automatically once set up.
The two are connected: the vault tracks who your child is and what's working over time; the gazette uses that to keep what it puts in front of them fresh and calibrated.
- Claude Code or Codex
- For the gazette: a printer and a Mac or PC that stays on during the day (if you want it to auto-print)
- Recommended: Obsidian (free version is fine)
No coding required.
Step 1. Download this repo. Click the green Code button above → Download ZIP → unzip it.
Step 2. Open Obsidian (free). Open the kid-vault folder as a vault. Browse around: the demo follows a fictional child named Maya Chen so you can see what a live vault looks like.
Step 3. Open Claude Code in the kid-vault folder. Say:
"Help me set up this vault for my child."
Claude Code will read the setup instructions and walk you through it — clearing the demo content, writing a first profile from what you tell it, and getting your vault ready to receive real notes.
Step 1. Download this repo (same as above).
Step 2. Open kid-gazette/MY_CHILD.md in any text editor. Fill it out — it asks about your child in plain English: their personality, interests, the values you want to pass on, what household skills you want them building. This is the important step, and it's yours to do. The AI doesn't know your kid. You do.
Step 3. Open Claude Code/Codex in the kid-gazette folder. Say:
"Set up the gazette for [child's name] using MY_CHILD.md."
Claude Code will generate a full content bank from what you wrote — 40+ quotes and culture bites drawn from the sources you named, 30+ real household missions calibrated to your kid's age, a daily checklist matching their routine — and walk you through connecting it to your printer and setting a print schedule. You won't touch any code.
If you want the vault and the gazette connected — so the newspaper adapts as you learn more about your kid — set up the vault first, then the gazette. When you're ready, say:
"Seed Maya's gazette profile from the Kid Vault."
Claude Code will read your vault and use it to inform the gazette's content, so you're not filling out MY_CHILD.md from scratch.
Using the Kid Vault: Adding a new observation or meeting summary:
Record a voice note after school meetings, practitioner calls, or your observations from notable moments with your child. See kid-vault/TRANSCRIPTION_PROJECT_PROMPT.md for a ready-made Claude or ChatGPT project that turns raw voice transcripts into structured notes. Drop the output in raw/, then say:
"Ingest the new source."
Before a school or clinical meeting:
"Help me prep for the meeting on Thursday with the school counselor."
Claude Code reads the vault, surfaces the relevant evidence, drafts questions grounded in what's documented, and flags what gaps the meeting could fill.
When the gazette feels stale:
Drop a note in kid-vault/wiki/gazette-log.md — "the Archimedes quote didn't land," "she's been asking about bridges." When you've accumulated a few, say:
"Curate Maya's gazette."
Claude Code reads your vault and the log, recommends what to add or retire from the content bank, and updates the gazette profile. The newspaper adapts without you managing it by hand.
A direct chat with consumer AI forgets context as the conversation goes longer, or when the session ends. A maintained library centered around your child gives the AI a more reliable basis for its reasoning — years of observations, what different practitioners have said, where they disagree, what's been tried and what worked. You can ask "what's changed since October" and get an answer based on real context that you control. Treat AI as the engine in your car, not the car itself.
The gazette solves a different problem: consistent delivery. If you ever think to yourself "I should expose my kid to more classical music, or more Stoic philosophy, or more real cooking," you know how hard it is to make that happen reliably every day. This is how I've started experimenting with developing better habits at home, in a fun way that my kids are enjoying.
The most important thing:
You, the parent, hold the knowledge. The AI holds the labor.
You know what your kid will respond well to, the topics they are drawn to, what your family talks about at dinner, the cadence of your week, what skills or habits you'd like your child to focus on. All of that lives in your head, for each of your children.
AI's job is to take that knowledge and turn it into 40 well-sourced culture bites, 30 calibrated missions, a print layout, a meeting brief. Given your input, it produces in minutes what would take you days. You are not asking the AI to figure out what matters about your child. You are the expert on your child. You're asking the AI to do the labor.
Things not yet in this repo:
- Travel activities — Personalized printed activity booklets for each kid for a trip: Built from their knowledge bases, printed and folded.
- Daily family brief — Life ops. Set up the home in 5 minutes for the after school rhythm. What is for snack, what is for dinner, what books/activities to set out for everyone, so you can jump from work mode to home mode without dropping all the balls. Generated from the calendar and the knowledge bases.
- Kid content curation — a digital shelf of curated podcast and video content matched to each kid's current interests and my values and aesthetics, updated from the vault.
- Physical library catalogue — our family's catalogue of books, served to life ops and the gazette for learning progression and activity management.
If you build something on top of this, I'd love to hear about it.
tradclaw by @clairevo is an OpenClaw scaffold for household ops — calendar briefs, school triage, meal planning, shopping, custom bedtime stories. It's my daily logistics layer.
Tradclaw answers "what do I need to do this morning." The Kid Vault answers "what do I know about my kid and how do I advocate for them." They're meant to work together.
- Andrej Karpathy — LLM Wiki concept
- Ben Kamens — hstack for the health knowledge-management application
- Claire Vo (@clairevo) — tradclaw for the household ops companion
MIT. Do what you want with it.