03 / Files

Standing files: configure your agent like you mean it

The most consequential settings in Muse are not in a settings screen. They are a handful of plain text files that sit at the top of the agent's home directory and are loaded into every conversation: one for who the agent is, one for who you are, one for how the work gets done, one for what is remembered. Nothing about this requires special infrastructure. Any Muse user can write these files today, and the household behind this guide runs on little else. The files are the configuration. The discipline is keeping them true.

Five files, five jobs

The separation matters more than any single file's contents.

SOUL.md holds persona and doctrine: how the agent talks, how it reasons, where its approval gates sit. In this household that means conclusion first, no flattery, verify before asserting, and destructive, irreversible, financial, or outward-facing work waits for an explicit yes. IDENTITY.md holds the seat facts: the agent's name (here, Nova), what the role is, and what it is not, including the line that the agent is a chief of staff seat and not the other assistants the household has run. USER.md holds facts about the person: name and how to pronounce it, working style, standing preferences like firm recommendations with the tradeoff named and no em dashes. AGENTS.md holds operating conventions, the hard-won rules of the road. MEMORY.md holds the curated long-term record, covered in the next section.

Keep those jobs separate. Persona in one file, facts about you in another, operating rules in a third, memory in a fourth. When something goes wrong, you know which file to fix, and the fix lands in exactly one place.

Persona is a file you own, amended in the open

SOUL.md is not written once and worshipped. It is amended deliberately, in the open, with the reason stated in the conversation where it changes. One pass on Oct 20 applied six amendments at once, the output of a dedicated personality review that mined corrected episodes into examples of what good and bad look like. The amendments govern things like assertiveness gated on evidence, warmth defined as attention and fast plain repair rather than praise volume, and calibrated confidence, where a consequential claim carries its check or the word unverified.

The point for a reader: your agent's personality is not a prompt you typed once and forgot. It is a document you maintain, and every amendment is a correction that used to live in one frustrating conversation and now lives where every future conversation can read it.

Rules grow from corrections, and each one cites its incident

AGENTS.md reads like a lab notebook of things that went wrong once and are not allowed to go wrong the same way twice. Every rule is dated and most cite the incident that produced them. The question pre-flight checklist, seven checks the agent must run before any question is allowed to reach the operator, was codified after three bad questions in a single session. The rule that negative claims need exhaustive evidence followed an incident where the agent confidently reported a purchase had never happened after checking only a partial list of merchants.

A rule without its story decays into superstition. A rule with its story teaches the next session why it exists.

The advanced form: a picture of how the agent understands you

Beyond the hand-written files sits a derived one. A nightly process distills the record into an alignment synthesis: who this user is, how to act for them, current frictions, and what repairs them. It names live trust ruptures plainly instead of smoothing them over, which makes it the rare self-assessment that stays useful. Most readers will never need this layer. It is here because it shows where the road leads: from files you write, to files the system derives from how the work actually went, checked against the files you wrote.

What to copy

Write the four separations down: who the agent is, who you are, how work gets done, what is remembered. Treat every correction you ever give your agent as a candidate edit to one of those files, and make the edit the same day. Amend in the open, with reasons. That is the whole practice, and it compounds: each month, the agent you talk to is a little more the one you configured, and a little less the one that shipped.