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Agent identity#

Prism Agent has a persistent identity made of a small set of markdown documents. These documents are always present in the agent's system prompt, so changing them changes how the agent thinks, talks, and acts. You edit all seven in the web UI Profile tabs and read them in the terminal UI config panel.

The seven documents#

Document Purpose Who usually keeps it current
Soul Personality, values, voice, and hard boundaries — the agent's constitution. You
User What the agent knows about the person or team it works for. The agent, as it learns
Memory A curated long-term summary the agent always keeps in context. The agent
Vision The user's longer-term goals for the agent to advance proactively. You
Agent Guide The operating manual — how the agent should behave, when to reach out, safety norms, Slack etiquette, coding workflow. You
Heartbeat The checks the agent runs on its heartbeat schedule. You
Bootstrap First-run onboarding instructions; cleared once setup is done. The agent (clears it)

The split under "who edits it" is about intent, not a hard lock. Documents that capture your intent (Soul, Vision, Agent Guide, Heartbeat) are yours to shape; documents that capture what the agent learns (User, Memory) it maintains itself. In practice you shape all of them through conversation — you ask the agent to change its soul or add a heartbeat check, and it uses its self-management tools to rewrite the document. To make the split a hard lock, turn on locked-in mode, which freezes these documents against the agent's own tools; your own editing keeps working.

Editing the documents#

The documents change three ways:

  • Through conversation. Tell the agent what you want — "from now on, be more concise," "remember that our staging cluster is eu-west-1," "add a heartbeat check for failing pods." It edits the relevant document itself.
  • In the web UI. Open the document's tab on the Profile page, change the text, and press Save. Add an optional note about what changed, which the version history keeps. The agent reads the new document on its next turn. Each save sends the whole document and the last one wins, so two editors open at once overwrite each other rather than merge. Saving the Heartbeat document also restarts the heartbeat.
  • On first run. The Bootstrap document drives an onboarding conversation that fills in Soul and User, then clears itself.

The terminal UI config panel is a viewer.

Version history#

Every write to one of the seven documents records a revision: when it happened, whether you or the agent wrote it, and why.

The Version history sidebar on the Profile page lists saved versions. Select a version to compare it with the current document, or use Compare versions to compare two saved versions. Restore this version brings a version back after a confirmation, and the agent reads the restored document on its next turn; the restore is itself a revision, so you can undo it.

The agent cannot restore a revision. Each document keeps its 500 newest revisions and drops the oldest past that.

The bootstrap flow#

On a brand-new agent, the Bootstrap document contains a short onboarding script. The agent uses it to ask who you are, what you want it to focus on, and how you like to work, then writes your answers into its Soul and User documents and calls its clear-bootstrap tool. After that, the Bootstrap tab is empty and the agent operates from its personalized identity. You see this once per agent.

Settings stored on the agent#

Beyond the documents, a few dials shape behavior and are stored on the agent:

  • Timezone (default UTC) — used for scheduling and daily resets.
  • Heartbeat interval (default 8 hours) — see Heartbeat.
  • Model — the LLM the agent runs on (defaults to the runtime's configured model).
  • Locked-in mode (default off) — freezes the documents above against the agent's own tools; see locked-in mode.

Adjust these by asking the agent, or from the web UI and TUI where exposed. Locked-in mode is the exception: only you can change it, never the agent.