What it asks, in order
Your name, so it knows what to call you.
Your Hub folder, the folder on your Mac where your files, projects and records will live. Pick or create one, put your files in it first; it stays fully local.
Watched folders, the folders its hourly pass sweeps for new material, an intake folder you drop things into, say. Add none and nothing outside your Hub is swept.
Location, optional and skippable, used only for the weather and daylight on your dashboard.
Gmail & Calendar, turned on through the Claude app's own Settings → Connectors, not typed in here. Continue stays off until both show connected.
Granola, optional, in the same panel and turned on the same way. Connect it and finished meetings are pulled in and filed on their own. Without it, meetings only arrive as transcript files you drop into a watched folder, so setup never waits on it.
Review, a summary of everything above, then one button: Set up Personal AI OS.
Why the connector step cannot be skipped: the app reads mail and calendar through Claude's own account-level Connectors rather than a password you'd hand it, so turning them on once is the only way in, the same way clicking past Gatekeeper above is the only way in.
One more setting, inside the Gmail connector: open its Tool permissions and set Create draft email and Update draft email to Always allow. Both ship as “Needs approval”, and an overnight run has nobody to ask, so replies get written and never reach your Drafts. Nothing else needs changing: sending, forwarding and deleting stay blocked whatever you set here.
Fill the Hub folder before you set up, and don't tidy it. A folder with real work already in it is what the first sort is for: loose files, cryptic names, scans, duplicates and years of drift are the job, not a problem to fix first. Start with tens of files, up to a few hundred, rather than your whole drive: a first sort too big to read is one you cannot judge, and judging it is how you learn whether to trust the next one. You can point it at more afterwards.
What it does with each kind of file. It reads Word files, PDFs, notes and CSVs, and pulls a spreadsheet in as a table. It cannot read PowerPoint, Keynote, Pages or Numbers files, the old .doc and .xls formats, photos, video, music, zips or apps, so those are filed on their name and date instead. Everything already in your Hub folder gets sorted into it whatever it is; from a watched folder afterwards, only what looks relevant to your projects crosses over.
File types, one by one
| What you have | Can it read it? | The file itself |
|---|
| Notes, Markdown, CSV | Yes | Comes in |
| Word, PDF | Yes | Comes in |
| Excel | Yes, and the first sheet becomes a table | The workbook stays put |
| A PDF that is only a scan, never run through OCR | No text in it to find | Comes in |
| PowerPoint, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, old .doc and .xls | No | Stays put |
| Photos, video, music, zip files, apps | No | Stays put |
Point it at files you already back up. The sensible start with any new tool: pick a folder that's part of your normal backup, or copy one somewhere new and work from the copy. Nothing was lost in our own testing and your files stay plain and readable throughout, though the app ships with no warranty and we carry no liability.
How long the first sort takes: about 5 to 10 minutes for 50 files, and it scales well from there, so 500 to 1,000 files usually lands inside an hour, often nearer 30 minutes depending on how complex they are. Most of the time goes on opening and reading, not moving, so a folder of scans takes longer than a folder of clearly-named documents. Start light anyway, watch the features work on a small set, then expand. Adding more later is easy.
Once it is set up, ask rather than move. Don't add, rename, move or delete anything inside the Hub by hand. Say what you want in the chat and it does the move, keeping every index and link in step. Do it yourself and the records still point at where the file used to be.
Adding files later. Drop them in a watched folder, the list in Settings → Watched folders. If it’s empty, nothing outside your Hub is read. Leave the app running and the hourly pass files whatever lands there. A newly added folder only picks up recent arrivals on its first sweep, so re-drop anything older.
