How It Works

Alfred Black is a full-stack private intelligence service. Every subscriber gets a dedicated machine — no shared infrastructure, no multi-tenant databases, no commingled data. The entire system is organized in six layers, each with a clear responsibility.

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Infrastructure Layer

Your dedicated machine. Every subscriber gets their own Hetzner Cloud server. Data encrypted at rest with LUKS2. All services bind to localhost — zero public ports. External access exclusively through your private Tailscale mesh. No shared infrastructure between subscribers. Your data never touches another subscriber’s machine.

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Agentic Layer

Your team of specialists. OpenClaw hosts five specialist workers — Curator, Janitor, Distiller, Surveyor, and Clerk — each with strictly enforced scope permissions. They interact with your vault only through a controlled CLI gate; they never touch the filesystem directly.

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Data Layer

Your world, flowing in. You don’t have to hand everything to Alfred manually. Streams are data pipelines that capture events from your email, calendar, payment providers, and ambient devices — delivering them to Alfred’s Inbox automatically. The Curator processes each event just as if you’d shared the content yourself.

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Semantic Layer

Your structured knowledge. The vault is an Obsidian-compatible collection of Markdown files. Alfred manages 22 record types across four layers: standing entities, activity records, learning types, and intuition types. Records connect through wikilinks, forming a growing knowledge graph. Over time, Alfred develops intuition — learned patterns that let it handle routine decisions on your behalf.

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Kinetic Layer

Your actions in motion. Temporal is the workflow engine. It orchestrates every specialist, intuition process, and action Alfred takes. The Kinetic layer is built around three core concepts: Matters (standing concerns that group related work, like “Kitchen renovation”), Errands (actionable tasks with an owner and status lifecycle), and Triage (items the Curator flagged for your review before processing — you promote them to tasks or dismiss them). Together they turn vault knowledge into proactive service.

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Interface Layer

Your points of contact. Every way you interact with Alfred — the dashboard, Vault Nebula (a 3D visualization of your knowledge graph), a Terminal proxy with full PTY support for direct CLI access to OpenClaw, messaging channels (WhatsApp, iMessage, Telegram, Discord), voice calls via Talk Mode, continuous listening via Ambient Mode, and the REST API. Every interface feeds into the same pipeline.

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Always working

Alfred doesn’t wait for you to ask. Your specialists and intuition processes run continuously in the background:

• Curator attends to new inbox items within seconds of arrival — whether shared manually or delivered by a Stream
• Janitor runs periodic health scans automatically
• Distiller and Surveyor can be triggered on-demand or scheduled
• Intuition observes, learns, and routes on automated schedules — no intervention needed

You can check on your specialists, trigger a run, and view their history from your dashboard or via the API.