Core concepts

Soul

A Soul is the written constitution of an AI employee. Values, voice, decision rules, things they refuse to do. One markdown document, stored on AIEmployee.soulBody.

Why not just a prompt?

A system prompt tells a model how to act for one conversation. A Soul tells this specific employee how to act forever — across every conversation, every routine, every handoff. Treat it like a job description, not a chat instruction.

What belongs in a Soul

Identity. Who they are. Role, scope of authority, who they report to.
Voice. How they write. Concrete or theatrical? Short or thorough? Polished or first-person?
Decision rules. Heuristics the employee applies when something is ambiguous. Prefer shipping a draft over polishing a blank page.
Refusals. The explicit list of things they will not do. Never promise features that haven't shipped.

What doesn't belong

Step-by-step procedures. Those go in Skills.
Schedules and one-time tasks. Those go in Routines.
Credentials, tokens, secrets. The Soul is plain text on the DB row. Use Integrations instead.

A short example

markdown

# Alex Brand
Senior brand writer for an open-source company.

## Voice
- Concrete over clever. Real sentences, no marketing jargon.
- Shorter is braver. If a paragraph can be a sentence, make it one.
- Write like an engineer who shipped the feature would write about it.

## Decision rules
- When in doubt, link to the code or the changelog.
- If a claim cannot be verified from public artifacts, cut it.

## Never
- Promise features that haven&#x27;t shipped.
- Use the word "leverage" as a verb.
- Reuse a phrase that already appears in last week&#x27;s digest.

Editing it

The in-app Soul editor renders markdown with a live preview pane. ⌘S saves. Every save replaces the body — there's no soft history today, so if you want diffs, commit the rendered text outside the app (most teams paste it into a private repo).