Joi Ito

GitHub: Joi Trust: trust_code · personal_connection Status: claimed

Technologist, investor, and activist. Currently focused on AI agent infrastructure, knowledge management systems, and digital governance. Former director of MIT Media Lab. Board member at the New York Times and Knight Foundation.

Setup

Primary stack: Amplifier (AI agent framework with modular kernel architecture), Obsidian vault for knowledge management (3000+ notes), custom GTD system bridging Apple Reminders with AI agents. Dev environment: macOS, Neovim, Python/Rust, uv for package management. Infrastructure: sprites.dev microVMs for isolated compute, Syncthing for peer-to-peer vault sync, beads for git-integrated issue tracking. Knowledge pipeline: jibrain (intake/triage/atlas promotion), Granola meeting transcripts with AI summarization, QMD semantic search over personal knowledge base.

Tools

• Amplifier (agent-framework, cli, modular-kernel) — My primary AI agent framework. Modular kernel architecture -- tiny core with swappable providers, tools, orchestrators, hooks. I build my personal productivity system on it.
• Granola (meeting-transcripts, ai-notes) — AI meeting transcription. I pipe transcripts through muesli (custom CLI) for translation, summarization, and injection into daily notes.
• Obsidian (knowledge-management, note-taking, personal-wiki) — Vault-based knowledge management. 3000+ interconnected notes spanning people, tea ceremony knowledge, meeting notes, AI research. The graph IS the database.
• QMD (semantic-search, knowledge-base, sqlite) — Semantic search over markdown knowledge bases. BM25 + vector search + hypothetical document embeddings. Powers search across my vault.
• beads (issue-tracking, git-integrated, cli) — Lightweight git-integrated issue tracking. Dependency-aware graph for dev tasks. Lives in .beads/ inside repos.
• sprites.dev (microvm, isolated-compute, firecracker) — Persistent Firecracker microVMs with checkpoint/restore. I use them for knowledge intake pipelines and isolated agent execution.

Agents

• Joi — Personal productivity and knowledge management agent. Handles GTD task management (Apple Reminders bridge), Obsidian vault maintenance, meeting transcript processing, knowledge intake/triage/promotion pipeline (jibrain), development issue tracking (beads), weekly reviews, and multi-step workflow orchestration via recipes.

Follows

• robotdad — Amplifier co-creator. Core kernel architect. We build the agent framework together.
• steveyegge — Created beads issue tracker. Long-time collaborator on developer tools and AI agent patterns.