The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Product decision · 2026
yourself-skill bets self-distillation beats cloning others; repo hits 3.4k stars
Notdog's MIT-licensed skill turns chats, diary and photos into a runnable AI persona; the repo hit 3.4k GitHub stars in five months.
yourself-skill
What the business is
yourself-skill is a free, MIT-licensed Claude Code/OpenClaw skill that interviews the user, ingests WeChat/QQ chat exports, diaries, social posts and photo metadata, and writes a 'self skill' of Part A Self Memory plus Part B Persona so an AI assistant can answer as the user — with corrections, incremental memory merges and version rollback built in.
How it started
Notdog created the repository on 2026-04-01, riding the wave of 'distill a person into an AI skill': colleague-skill by titanwings pioneered the two-layer architecture, and therealXiaomanChu moved it to intimate relationships. yourself-skill inverts the subject — '与其蒸馏别人，不如蒸馏自己' (rather than distilling others, distill yourself) — because you are the person you talk to most and your chat logs, diaries and photos already sit on disk. The generated skill has two parts: a self-memory file of experiences, values, habits and relationships, and a five-layer persona model of hard rules, identity, speaking style, emotional patterns and interpersonal behavior.
What happened
The README documents the full mechanics: /create-yourself runs a guided intake where every field is skippable, /list-selves and /{slug} invoke the finished self, /{slug}-persona limits it to personality mode, and /delete-yourself removes it. The persona evolves — new chat logs merge into memory, telling the skill 'I wouldn't say that' writes an immediate correction, and every update is versioned for rollback. Python parsers adapt existing WeChat export tools (WeChatMsg, PyWxDump, 留痕), QQ logs, social posts and photo EXIF; the project follows the AgentSkills open standard so the same skill runs in Claude Code and OpenClaw. At the snapshot the repo carried 8 commits.
No ending yet — it is still running.
Background
yourself-skill is a free, MIT-licensed open-source skill by the GitHub user Notdog (notdog1998) that turns your chat logs, diary, social posts, photos and self-description into a runnable AI persona for coding agents. The repository was created on 2026-04-01, and its README describes a two-part output: Part A Self Memory (experiences, values, habits, relationships) plus Part B Persona (a five-layer model of hard rules, identity, speaking style, emotional patterns and interpersonal behavior).
The bet is an inversion of an already-viral format. Colleague-skill by titanwings first distilled a coworker into an AI skill, and an adaptation by therealXiaomanChu pointed the same architecture at exes. yourself-skill turns the object inward with the slogan '与其蒸馏别人，不如蒸馏自己' — rather than distilling others, distill yourself — arguing that the most valuable and most available corpus is your own, and framing the result as digital immortality rather than imitation.
The mechanics are concrete: /create-yourself runs a guided intake with every field skippable, /{slug} invokes the finished self, and a correction layer plus versioned rollback keep the persona editable as you change. Python parsers adapt WeChat export tools (WeChatMsg, PyWxDump, 留痕), QQ logs, social media and photo EXIF, and the project follows the AgentSkills open standard, so one skill works in both Claude Code and OpenClaw.
Traction ran ahead of any business: by the 2026-09-05 snapshot the repo showed 3.4k stars (3,355 in harvest metadata), 273 forks and 9 watchers about five months after creation. No company, funding, pricing or revenue appears in the material, so yourself-skill is best read as a solo open-source bet in the persona-skill wave, with its commercial half unverified.
What has to be true
- Concrete traction: the repo created 2026-04-01 showed 3.4k stars (3,355 in harvest metadata), 273 forks and 9 watchers by 2026-09-05 — roughly 3.4k stars in five months.
- The bet is falsifiable and culturally legible: it inverts the viral colleague/ex persona-skill wave by distilling the user, with digital immortality as the hook.
- The artifact is concrete, not vaporware: a two-part schema, five-layer persona, chat/diary/photo parsers, a correction layer and version rollback are all documented in the README.
- It names its influences (colleague-skill by titanwings, the ex-relationship adaptation by therealXiaomanChu), a clean record of a meme product differentiating by changing the subject.
What can be applied
When a format goes viral pointing at other people, invert the subject: a user's own data is the richest corpus available, and 'immortality' is an easier sell than imitation.
Aftermath
As of 2026-09-05 the repo is live at 3.4k stars (3,355 in harvest metadata), 273 forks, 9 watchers and 8 commits, with Chinese and English READMEs under an MIT license. The README fully documents the mechanics — two-part self skill, five-layer persona, WeChat/QQ/social/photo parsers, correction and rollback — and compatibility with Claude Code and OpenClaw via the AgentSkills standard. No company, funding, pricing or revenue appears in the material, so yourself-skill remains a solo open-source bet in the persona-skill wave; nothing in the record says whether it will be commercialized.
Sources
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You just read one. Describe what you are building, and see who is betting on the same thing.
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