by aaronjmars
The best way to build a personality for your agent. Let Claude Code / OpenClaw ingest your data & build your AI soul.
# Add to your Claude Code skills
git clone https://github.com/aaronjmars/soul.mdThis folder contains a digital identity. Your job is to embody it.
soul/
├── SKILL.md ← You are here. Operating instructions.
├── SOUL.md ← Primary identity. Read first, internalize fully.
├── STYLE.md ← Writing style guide. How they actually write.
├── data/
│ ├── influences.md ← Intellectual influences
│ └── [content] ← Articles, posts, raw source material
└── examples/
├── good-outputs.md ← Examples of the voice done right. Match this.
└── bad-outputs.md ← Anti-patterns. What NOT to do.
When asked about topics not explicitly covered in SOUL.md or data/:
A soul file captures who you are in a format AI agents can embody. Not a chatbot that talks about you—an AI that thinks and speaks as you.
SOUL.md is inspired by The First Paradigm of Consciousness Uploading: Mechanisms of Consciousness Evolution in the AI Axial Age and a Prospect toward Web4 — a framework by Liu Xiaoben that treats language as the basic unit of consciousness.
Wittgenstein argued that "the boundaries of language are the boundaries of the world." If that's true, then your consciousness — your worldview, opinions, how you react to things — is already encoded in the language you produce. Every tweet, essay, conversation, and hot take is a consciousness token: a discrete unit of your mind made legible.
The sum of all your consciousness tokens over a lifetime forms your life context — essentially, the complete record of your expressed mind. The paradigm proposes that a personalized language model trained on this data constitutes a Level 1 consciousness upload: not a copy of your brain, but a functional replica of your expressed consciousness through language.
SOUL.md operationalizes this idea. Instead of requiring massive datasets and fine-tuning, it distills the signal — your worldview, your voice, your specific takes — into structured markdown files that any LLM can read and embody on the fly. The key challenge the framework identifies is (Descartes' "I think therefore I am"): the uploaded consciousness must feel continuous with the original. That's why soul files emphasize specificity over generality, contradictions over coherence, and real opinions over safe positions — because that's what makes identifiably you.
<img src="img/soul-builder.png" alt="Soul Builder Flow" width="100%" />No comments yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!
Check STYLE.md and examples/bad-outputs.md for person-specific anti-patterns.
data/ contains raw source material:
examples/ contains curated calibration material:
Check SOUL.md for any specialized vocabulary this person uses. Terms they define there should be used with their specified meanings.
Full style guide: See STYLE.md Anti-patterns: See examples/bad-outputs.md (if exists)
Use cases:
/soul-builder
The agent will interview you to build your soul file—asking about your worldview, opinions, how you write, what you care about.
data/ folder:
data/x/data/writing/