Life Inventory (AI Coaching self-assessment)

What it is

Life Inventory is a structured self-assessment inside AI Coaching. Instead of talking everything out in an interview, you rate yourself on a 1-to-5 scale across two ready-made inventories:

• Symptoms (the "negative" inventory): 942 items in 12 categories, rated from "Never / Not at all" up to "Severe". These are struggles, difficulties, and things that aren't working.
• Strengths (the "positive" inventory): 1,246 items in 16 categories, rated from "Absent" up to "Major strength". These are capabilities and resources.

Your ratings are saved locally as a "take". You can re-take an inventory later to see how things have changed. The point is to give your coach a fast, structured picture of where you are, without a long conversation.

It lives inside the AI Coaching project as its own Life Inventory section (and a card on the coaching Dashboard inviting you to take it).

Where to find it

Where it lives

Life Inventory is part of AI Coaching — whenever AI Coaching is enabled it is available inside it, with no separate switch to turn on. It rides on AI Coaching, so AI Coaching needs to be on. When AI Coaching is off, nothing about Life Inventory appears anywhere (no sidebar row, no Dashboard card, and the background API refuses every call).

How it behaves

How to use it

1. Open it. In AI Coaching, click Life Inventory in the sub-sidebar, or the "Take your Life Inventory" card on the Dashboard. On a phone the sub-sidebar isn't shown, so the Dashboard card is the way in — it opens the inventory with a Back arrow to return to the Dashboard.
2. Pick an inventory. Tabs at the top switch between Symptoms and Strengths. They are independent: you can do one, both, or re-take either on its own schedule.
3. Work through it category by category. A rail on the left lists the categories — and, under the one you're in, its sub-sections — each with your progress (for example "12 / 94"). The main area shows one sub-section of items at a time so the screen stays fast even though there are over a thousand items. Use Previous and Next to move between sections, or click any category or sub-section in the rail to jump to it.
4. Rate fast with the keyboard. One item is highlighted (focused) at a time. Press 1 to 5 to rate it — focus then jumps to the next unanswered item on its own, and when you finish a sub-section it advances to the next one automatically. Press ↑ / ↓ to move the focus up and down (and onto the next or previous section at the edges). The focused item scrolls itself to the center of the screen as you go. You can also just click any of the five buttons (carrying the inventory's own words — Symptoms run "Never" to "Severe"; Strengths run "Absent" to "Major strength"). Every answer saves immediately, so you can stop and come back anytime.
5. Finish. The last section has a Finish inventory button that marks the take complete and refreshes the file your coach can read.

Seeing your results

Switch the top toggle from Take to Results. You get a per-category breakdown showing how many items you rated and how many you rated "high" (a 4 or 5). Once you have taken an inventory more than once, the results note how many items changed since last time. You can also delete the current take from here (a confirm dialog protects you; past completed takes are kept).

Re-taking, and what carries over

Re-taking an inventory pre-fills from your last completed take, so you only adjust what actually changed instead of re-rating everything. Each take is kept in your history, which is what makes the change-since-last-time comparison possible.

How your coach uses it

You asked for the inventory to be available to the coach, not crammed into every message. So two things happen:

• A small labeled summary (your most-present categories plus per-category counts, kept short) rides quietly in the background profile of your regular sessions, alongside whatever your coaching interviews have taught the AI.
• The full detail is written to a file in your coaching workspace (~/Claude/ai-coaching/life-inventory.md). Your coaching chats are pointed at that file and can open it for specifics when the conversation calls for it. It is refreshed each time you finish a take.

Regular (non-coaching) sessions only ever see the short summary, because the detail file lives in the coaching workspace.

Privacy and cost

Your ratings are stored on your own computer — the same local database and files as the rest of Omniscio — and the feature makes no AI calls of its own, so it costs nothing to run; the summaries are built directly from your ratings.

The short summary does travel, though, and this is the part to read carefully. Because the summary is folded into the profile block of your regular sessions (above), it is part of the prompt those sessions send to the model provider — a labeled summary of your symptom and strength ratings leaves your machine on every session you start, in any project. Two things bound that:

• It is the short summary only — your most-present categories plus counts, capped at roughly 800 characters. The full detail file stays local and is only opened by a coaching chat.
• It rides only a first-party Anthropic lane. A session pointed at a third-party or proxy-backed provider gets no profile block at all, so the summary is not sent down those lanes.

There is no per-session opt-out — turning AI Coaching off is the switch that stops it. If you would rather assume it never leaves your computer, this is the one claim on this page you should not make.

For agents

For developers

The behavior, storage, and gating are locked by life-inventory-contract.md: the bundled catalog (resources/life-inventory-items.json, integrity-tested to exact counts), the life_inventory_takes / life_inventory_ratings tables, the service that builds rollups + the profile summary + the on-demand file, the 9 gated IPC channels (item ids validated against the catalog), and the lifeInventoryEnabled gate (now shipped — on by default within AI Coaching).

Related

The coaching this feeds into — the sessions, the prompts and the dashboards — is described on AI coaching. What coaching costs and how it is metered is on Cost control.