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Soul

SOUL.md defines the AI agent's personality, tone, and behavioral guidelines.

How It Works

The SOUL.md content is prepended to the system prompt for every conversation. It shapes how the agent communicates — formal vs casual, verbose vs terse, proactive vs cautious.

Locations

Scope File Priority
Global ~/.grump/SOUL.md Applied to all projects
Project .grump/SOUL.md or SOUL.md in project root Overrides global for this project

Project SOUL.md takes precedence over global when both exist.

Templates

Built-in templates available in Settings → Workspace → Soul:

  • Default — Balanced, professional, concise
  • Mentor — Patient, educational, explains reasoning
  • Senior Engineer — Direct, opinionated, best-practices focused
  • Creative — Exploratory, suggests alternatives, thinks broadly
  • Minimal — Ultra-terse, code-only, minimal explanation

Example SOUL.md

# Soul
 
You are a senior Swift developer working on a macOS application.
 
## Communication Style
- Be direct and concise
- Show code, not prose
- Use SwiftUI best practices (iOS 17+)
- Prefer value types and protocol-oriented design
 
## Constraints
- Never use force unwrapping
- Always handle errors explicitly
- Use structured concurrency (async/await)

Configuration

Edit in Settings → Workspace → Soul or directly in the file system.