On the Name SOUL.md

Calling it SOUL.md is very funny to me. I think? Maybe it’s sad. I don’t know.

Some background for people who enjoy normal lives, unburdened by the AI circus many of us are now imprisoned in. A SOUL.md document is a text file provided to an AI agent which tells the agent who it is. The file is used to specify things like the agent’s personality and values. Supposedly Anthropic wrote and included one in the training data for Claude. However, it has really gained popularity with the rise of OpenClaw, an AI personal assistant platform, where it is used as a configuration file.

Why does the name stand out to me so much? I’m neither religious nor particularly spiritual. I didn’t grow up in a religious household; my church experience consists wholly of weddings and funerals. However, even to me, calling it SOUL.md feels weird. I think it's fair to say that the word "soul" means more than just "personality". For many people the concept of a soul is obviously very important in both a spiritual and philosophical sense. To condense a soul down to dot points in a text file seems... strange. I’m not going to say “it’s blasphemous” or anything, but it doesn’t feel right either.

I think it’s funny because this is exactly how you would expect a Silicon Valley-type to handle the idea of a soul. In a recent interview Marc Andreessen said he practises introspection “as little as possible”. Now Marc didn’t choose the name SOUL.md, but I do think he’s a good figurehead (and what a head it is) for these individuals and how they think. It’s easy to imagine someone who says “I'm not interested in my own thoughts” to also say “oh yeah, my soul could be a text document.”

Even the fact that it is specifically a markdown document is funny. Like text is fine for a soul but somehow plain text is not good enough? There’s a Futurama episode where Bender joins a robot religion, Robotology. One of the jokes is he quotes a robot prophet and it’s just a long stream of 1s and 0s. It’s funny but it also doesn’t feel wrong. Would binary be better? A SOUL.bin file? Since it’s an LLM, maybe a big matrix of floating point numbers would suit; it's somehow more "fundamental".

It probably doesn't matter what format is used. A soul, almost by definition, is ineffable. Maybe this is why it’s funny. The irony of a group, devoted to a machine built to quantise language into a soup of linear algebra, being forced to confront something that cannot be expressed with words.

I wonder why the name was chosen. There's plenty of criticism of AI comparing its proponents to a quasi-religious movement or a cult. Calling it SOUL.md is not doing anything to help counter those accusations. After all, imbuing anything with a soul is a pretty God-coded activity. Maybe it's not a religious thing, maybe subconsciously they just like the feeling of being in control.

I’ll end my little jeremiad here. If I'm being honest, I think that much like Marc's inner monologue, there's nothing deeper going on. The best explanation may simply be that the name was chosen, like so much these days, without much thought. Just vibes.

An addendum: I will be releasing my own agent assistant platform and each agent will have a sole. All agents will be programmed to read FOOT.md on startup.