First I called it Dryft, but that was taken.
Then I tried Ryft. Taken.
Seska? Ugh.
Ardra? Dammit!.
Laya? Of course that's taken.
And on and on and on..
Eventually I said "screw it!".
So just use ThisDamnThing.

ThisDamnThing

A persistent local workspace for AI agents. Keep your knowledge, projects, rules and reusable workflows together, even when you switch agents.

Claude Code and Codex do the work. ThisDamnThing keeps the context: a reviewed knowledge brain, your workspace Constitution, linked projects, skills and Stacks. Use either agent, or both, with the same workspace. Your knowledge stays in readable Markdown files on your machine.

Make your workspace your own

Install and create a workspace

You need Python 3.11+ and pipx. Install Claude Code or Codex separately if you want an agent integration.

Ask your agent:

Install and set up ThisDamnThing via pipx, create a workspace at [my chosen directory], and check it.

Replace the bracketed directory with your preferred location. Setup has no ThisDamnThing skill before installation. Open the created workspace in your agent, review its workspace and hook trust prompts, and use /tdt-workspace in Claude or $tdt-workspace in Codex, or select it from the skill picker.

For terminal setup, run these examples from a parent directory outside your projects and the ThisDamnThing source checkout. Paths are relative to that directory.

pipx install thisdamnthing
tdt init "./my workspace"
tdt --workspace "./my workspace" doctor

You can also cd into your chosen folder and run tdt init without a path to initialize the current directory, then run tdt doctor.

Choose a workspace folder outside your existing projects. If pipx asks you to update PATH, follow its instructions and reopen your shell. ThisDamnThing starts with zero stacks and detects Claude and Codex on PATH. Add --agent claude, --agent codex, --agent both or --agent none to init to choose explicitly. Existing unrelated files are preserved; conflicting files are refused.

Read the usage guides, or open the local guides in your workspace's docs/ folder.

Developing ThisDamnThing

Working on ThisDamnThing itself? Start with the developer documentation for setup, architecture and development practices. Open this source checkout in your agent and say “onboard me” for guided development setup.

Development setup · Architecture · Making a change

Licensed under Apache-2.0.

If you find any bugs, it's because I left them there, so I have something to do later.