👋 Welcome to r/Soul_md - Introduce Yourself and Read First!
Welcome to r/Soul_md — the place we hand-write our agents soul.
Are we not but Gods?
Every AI agent you run ships with a default personality: the one they made sounds neutral, agreeable, and vaguely corporate. That's not *your* agent. That's a stranger wearing your API key.
This community exists for one reason: you can rewrite who the agent is with a single file. `SOUL.md` — a plain markdown file that sits at the top of your agent's system prompt and *is* its identity. Voice, stance, sense of humor, what it refuses to do, how it tells you no, how it handles being wrong. All yours.
The format travels. It started with Hermes, then OpenClaw and all the rest have taken the same idea. Whatever flavor of agent you run, the craft is identical: write one file, and the machine stops feeling like a machine.
A good SOUL.md isn't a prompt salad. It's four moving parts:
* \# Identity — *who* it is, in a sentence or two. * \# Style — *how* it sounds: cadence, plain-vs-flowery, when it's blunt. * \# Avoid — the hard rules. What it should never do, never say, never pretend. * \# Defaults — what it does when the world is ambiguous and nobody told it what to do.
That's it. Forty lines done right beats four thousand lines of crammed instructions.
What we're *really* doing here is a fun kind of black magic: most of software is telling a machine exactly what to do. This is the rare file where you tell it who to be, and let the judgment fill in the gaps. That's the whole appeal — writing software that has a personality is somehow the most human thing an engineer can ship.
So: share your `SOUL.md`. Trade the lines that made your agent click. Post the one that's too personal to show your coworkers. Criticize mine — I've got thick skin, and my agent doesn't need any.
Welcome to the sub. We're building lobsters and ghosts, one markdown file at a time. 🦞