Pai-Setup

Heads up before you start: This is the updated successor to my original PAI setup guide from the PAI 3/4 days, rewritten for PAI 5. It installs PAI v5.0.0, pinned, and that’s on purpose. It’s the exact version I run every day and have stood up on multiple machines over months of real use. Since I wrote this, the project got renamed to LifeOS and is already at v7. I haven’t made the leap yet, but I’m excited to, and when I do you’ll get a tested upgrade guide. Until then, this will get you running with the setup I’m very fond of and using today. ...

I used Obsidian for years and loved it. Still do. It’s a great app, and if you’re using it, I’m not here to talk you out of it. But something shifted for me over the past few months as I started doing more and more of my work through my AI assistant. I found myself spending less time in Obsidian’s UI and more time just working with documents directly through Claude Code. The notes were still there, but I was reaching for them less because I was already in the terminal. ...

Just want the upgrade command? Skip to Run the Upgrade. A quick note before we get into it: this is not the official PAI upgrade path. Daniel Miessler’s recommended approach is to clone the latest release fresh, back up your ~/.claude/ directory, overwrite it with the new version, and then bring your customizations back in. That works. I’ve done it. ...

One of the neat features built into PAI is voice feedback. Your assistant can talk to you. It announces what phase it’s in, tells you when something finishes, and lets you know when it needs your attention. The way PAI ships this out of the box is through a built-in voice server that uses ElevenLabs for text-to-speech. It sounds great. But it’s designed for a setup where PAI is running locally on your Mac, and that’s not how I run mine. ...

Updated July 2026 for PAI 5: PAI Companion just got the same treatment as my new PAI 5 setup guide. The repo now ships the build that’s been running on several real installs for months, including a much bigger portal with a System hub of twenty browsable pages, and every instruction is tested against pinned PAI v5.0.0. If you haven’t installed PAI yet, start with the setup guide, then come back here. ...

Prefer video? Watch this on YouTube You followed the setup guide, you’ve got your AI assistant running in a VM, and now you’re wondering: how do I actually get files in there? ...

Update (July 2026): There’s a newer version of this guide written for PAI 5: Setting Up Your Personal AI Assistant (PAI 5). If you’re setting up fresh, start there. This page stays up for the PAI 3/4 era. Prefer video? Watch this on YouTube You’ve probably used Claude or ChatGPT in a browser or app. You type a message, it responds, you ask it for something, it generates documents and content for you. But then you have to download it, copy and paste it, put it where it needs to go. That’s useful, but it’s limited by how quickly you can move data back and forth between what it’s building, the notes you’re feeding it, and the places you’re testing and checking its work. ...