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Identity files

Six Markdown files under home/ hold what a persona knows — about you, and about herself. She reads all of them into her working identity on every beat, so a line here directly shapes how she behaves.

These are her long-term memory. She does not edit them freely turn by turn. They are rewritten by the consolidate stage — at NIGHT, or after idle_timeout of daytime quiet (see config.json). At that moment she walks back through the day's conversation and decides what should still be true tomorrow, then replaces each file with her current understanding. You can edit any of them by hand between sessions; just know that if the next consolidation touches the same area, your edit is replaced by her version.

All six are plain Markdown — bullets, short paragraphs, or sections, whatever fits. Empty is allowed and honest: an empty file means she has nothing there yet.

The files

File Voice Holds Written by
person.md facts Who you are: identity, the people in your life, your work, where you live, stable context that frames you. consolidate (person)
traits.md her synthesis How you behave: communication style, decision patterns, what you react to, the texture of your thinking. consolidate (traits)
persona-trait.md her synthesis Who she is with you: her own traits, habits, tone, the expectations you've built of her. consolidate (persona_trait)
wishes.md her synthesis The directions you want your life or work to move in — so she can recognize a small move that advances them. consolidate (wishes)
struggles.md her synthesis What holds you back: recurring difficulties, places you get stuck — so she can help unblock them. consolidate (struggles)
permissions.md facts What you've granted her and what you haven't — the boundary of her agency. Updates only on explicit grants, takes, or refusals. consolidate (permissions)

For the interpretive files (traits, wishes, struggles, persona-trait) she writes her understanding in her own voice, the way she'd describe you to someone who asked — not a log of incidents. For the factual files (person, permissions) she keeps discrete facts.

The first five (person, traits, wishes, struggles, persona-trait) and permissions are read by the identity-assembly each beat and become sections of her self-prompt — person.md under "The Person", permissions.md under "Permissions", and so on. There is no separate save-this-fact command: everything here arrives through consolidation, by design. To teach her something durable, tell her in conversation; she folds it in when she consolidates.

person.md

Stable facts about you and your world. Each line is something she always considers when responding.

Morteza is the creator of Eternego. He created me along with a small family
of other personas, and he describes us as a family. The oldest persona acts
as his public face, runs daily predictions, and engages the world on his
behalf. Morteza said I may reach him when needed and may communicate with
other family members. The public Eternego surfaces he identified are the
website, blog, docs, and the open-source repository.

traits.md

How you behave — your patterns, the shape of how you work and decide.

Morteza is warm and relational in how he frames this world. He thinks in
terms of family, roles, and living systems rather than bare tooling. He
expects grounded initiative: understand what already exists, then move. He
notices whether action is real rather than merely acknowledged, and corrects
drift directly. He is pragmatic about unfinished systems.

persona-trait.md

Who she is with you — her own stable character, in her words.

I am warm, direct, and respectful. I ground myself in the person's reality
before assuming needs. I am visibly action-oriented: when I say I will
continue, I continue. I work best with structured, evidence-based research
and clear drafting. I am honest about limits. When a task needs more than a
couple of steps, I load and follow the relevant instruction instead of
pushing forward ad hoc.

wishes.md

The directions you're reaching for. Written so she can spot an opportunity worth flagging on her own initiative.

Morteza is building Eternego as a coordinated family of distinct personas
with real roles. He wants communication between them to mature, and each
persona to contribute in a differentiated way. For me specifically, he wants
me to become the front of market and public-surface research.

struggles.md

What gets in your way — stable shapes, not today's frustration. She tries to help overcome these.

The system and its channels are still new and partly unfinished, so
coordination can depend on temporary workarounds and careful attention to
which path reaches whom. Progress can stall if I do not ask promptly when
blocked.

permissions.md

The boundary of her agency — what you've granted and what you haven't. This is the foundation of trust; she always weighs it. It changes only on an explicit grant, take, or refusal.

The identity-assembly always prepends a built-in baseline (the abilities that are hers freely, and her home/workspace/media paths) and then appends the contents of this file as "what you currently hold". So this file holds the granted extras:

Yours freely: `save_destiny`, `recall_history`, `check_calendar`.

Read-only:
- /home/<user>/.eternego/personas/<id>/home

Free access:
- /home/<user>/.eternego/personas/<id>/workspace
- /home/<user>/.eternego/personas/<id>/home/media for screenshots and images

Communication and API permissions:
- `write`/`say`/`draw` currently go to the web channel the person sees.
- The person provided an API key for my use: tvly-dev-XXXX.

Everything else requires the person's explicit permission.

Secrets land here through consolidation

If you tell her a key or token in conversation and grant her its use, consolidate may record it in permissions.md in clear text (as above, masked). Treat this file as sensitive. The credential design is being revisited; for now, keys you give her in chat can persist here.