OpenWork is a free desktop app that reads and writes the markdown files on your own hard drive — the open-source counterpart to Claude Cowork. This walks through installing it, choosing a model without handing your documents to a training set, and turning a messy folder into topic domains you approved.
Most advice about getting AI to work with your own writing starts with a product. Upload to this, sync with that, connect the other thing.
They want to lock you into a product, so I’ve been going a different route … a local folder of markdown files that I can manage across AI tool sets.
Your files stay on your hard drive as plain text, in folders you named, and an assistant reads them off the disk the way you would.
You may have heard of this idea … building an LLM wiki as a second brain. But Karpathy’s version of this idea has the LLM build and maintain the wiki while he stays out of it.
I work the other way round. I want control of the knowledge. The assistant does the grunt work, but doesn’t decide the structure. Through agent documentation, I can control the shape of knowledge and keep myself in the looop.
What you need for any of this is a tool that can read and write files on your own machine.
Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work both do it and both cost $20 a month, which is probably worth it.
OpenWork does it for free. This video walks through setting it up, and ends with a folder of my research PDFs sorted into topic domains I approved.
[video]
1:14 — What these files actually look like, in Obsidian
3:13 — The OpenWork interface and workspaces
4:43 — A real question against my teaching vault: write an AI policy for a workshop I’ve never run
6:32 — Download and install
7:18 — Choosing a model, and the privacy question
9:46 — Permissions, and pointing it at a folder
11:12 — When it doesn’t work: two things to check
12:21 — Turning a messy folder into topic domains
How do you choose a model when using OpenWork
OpenWork isn’t locked into a model. They have their own open source models, but you can also connect to other models.
If you already have an OpenAI or Anthropic key, use it. You pay what the API costs, and that provider’s privacy terms are the ones that apply to everything you do in OpenWork.
That’s the route I’d take if any of your material is sensitive.
The free models through OpenCode Zen are better than I expected. I used Big Pickle for everything in this video. Slower than Claude, but the quality holds up.
Here’s the catch. Your data may be used to improve the model during the trial period when using these free models. That includes training.
In this tutorial, you’ll point this at a folder of your own documents, so if any of it is client work, unpublished writing, or personal notes, don’t use the free tier.
Published material, or a folder you put together for the experiment, is fine.
Third option is Zen credits, $20 minimum with auto-reload at $5 and allow you to pick and choose from any model (including Open AI, Claude, and Gemini). So if you like playing around between models, this is a good choice.
Why can’t open work access my folder?
If you have trouble accessing folders with Open Work, its usually one of two things.
Your operating system has to grant OpenWork access to the disk, which happens in your privacy settings and looks different on every machine.
And if the folder lives in iCloud or another cloud service without being kept downloaded locally, the assistant sees file stubs rather than files.
Keep the folder on your hard drive.
What comes after setup?
The tutorial ends with a set of folders. What it doesn’t have yet is the part that makes retrieval reliable — the documents that tell your assistant what each folder is for, what to read first, and to show you a summary table before it touches anything.
The full activity sheet from the Kraków workshop — all six activities, every prompt written out — is available to paid subscribers here. It also lives in the Structured Skills Library alongside the other skills.
More to come in future posts!
If you build something with OpenWork, tell me in the comments!
