better-soul

What This Skill Does

The better-soul skill is a specialized documentation engine designed to help AI developers and agent architects craft distinct, authentic personalities for their OpenClaw agents. Rather than generating generic, corporate-sounding "helpful assistant" prompts, this skill enforces the SoulSpec standard and integrates philosophical principles from Anthropic’s Claude soul document research. It serves as an opinionated template generator that forces you to define agent values, communication constraints, and behavioral boundaries, ensuring your AI acts with agency and consistency.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your local OpenClaw environment, run the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/asimons81/better-soul

Use Cases

• Establishing Agent Identity: Use it when launching a new agent from scratch to define its core persona and avoid the 'default AI' tone.
• Refining Existing Agents: Use it to audit an agent that feels too robotic or indecisive, helping to inject specific, value-driven behaviors.
• Complex Agent Orchestration: Use the SoulSpec structure to separate high-level personality from tactical workflow logic, ensuring your agents remain modular and readable.
• Team Consistency: Maintain a standard persona framework across a fleet of specialized agents to ensure they share a unified voice and set of core values.

Example Prompts

1. "better-soul generate a personality for a cynical but highly accurate code reviewer agent. Focus on brevity and brutal honesty."
2. "I have an agent named 'Researcher' that feels too flowery. Use better-soul to draft a new SOUL.md that forces it to be direct, avoid fluff, and admit when it doesn't have enough data."
3. "Create a SoulSpec file structure for a personal assistant agent. I want it to be professional but capable of dry humor when appropriate."

Tips & Limitations

• Tip: Do not put workflow instructions in SOUL.md. Keep it strictly about 'who' the agent is. Use AGENTS.md for task logic.
• Tip: Less is more. A powerful SOUL.md should be readable in under 60 seconds by the agent itself during the context-loading phase.
• Limitation: This skill does not automatically inject personality into the agent's actual system prompt; it provides the documentation that you must manually or programmatically feed into the agent's configuration. Ensure your agent framework is set up to ingest these files correctly.