干将, the Chinese name of the AgentSoul iPhone app, is the name of a legendary sword-smith. Gan Jiang and his wife Mo Ye are said to have forged a pair of swords in the Spring and Autumn period, more than two and a half thousand years ago. The app takes his name because it treats an AI agent’s personality the same way: as something you forge, carefully, from real material.
The story, as it is usually told
In the version most readers meet first, from the Han-era Wu Yue Chunqiu, the king of Wu asks Gan Jiang to make swords. Gan Jiang gathers the finest metal from the mountains, watches the sky and the earth for the right moment, and lights his furnace. But the metal will not melt. Months pass, and still it refuses to flow.
Mo Ye asks what is wrong. Gan Jiang remembers that his own teacher once faced the same problem, and that the smith and his wife gave something of themselves to the fire before the metal would yield. Mo Ye cuts her hair and nails and casts them into the furnace. The bellows roar, the metal finally runs, and two swords are born. The male blade is named Gan Jiang and the female blade Mo Ye.
Later retellings make the story darker. Some say Mo Ye threw herself into the furnace. In the Soushen Ji, a collection of strange tales from the fourth century, the smiths work for the king of Chu instead, and the tale becomes one of revenge carried out by their son. Lu Xun retold that version in the twentieth century as the short story Forging the Swords.
Legend, not history
The sources disagree about which king, which state and what Mo Ye sacrificed, and none of them can be checked against archaeology in the way a dated inscription can. That is normal for stories this old. What stays constant across the versions is the shape of the tale: a great work does not come out of the furnace until the maker puts something real into it.
Why a sword-smith suits an AI agent app
Most AI agents start as blank, generic assistants. You can give one a personality by writing a long prompt from scratch, or by copying someone else’s. AgentSoul takes a third path that echoes the legend: it forges the agent’s character from something genuinely yours, either your own chat screenshots or a conversation about real moments in your life.
- The raw material is you: how you communicate, decide and react.
- The furnace is the forge: Flash Forge 闪电熔铸 for speed, Gao Dao 高导 for depth, Deep Forge on the web for a structured questionnaire.
- The blade is a set of four files, soul.md, identity.md, user.md and agents.md, that give an agent a stable character.
- Like the two swords, the result comes as a pair of sorts: an agent, and the person it is built to serve.
The forging language in the app
Once you notice the metaphor, you see it everywhere. The welcome screen button says “Start forging”. Flash Forge’s Chinese name, 闪电熔铸, means lightning smelting. A failed run says “This forge didn’t finish”. Your finished result is called a soul, much as a famous blade carried its own name, and it is shown on the nine-point Enneagram figure the app calls its sigil. None of this changes how the app works, but it is a reminder of the attitude behind it: take care with what you put into the fire, because the agent will carry it.
The English name, “AgentSoul: Enneagram for Bots”, says what the app does. The Chinese name, 干将, says how it hopes you will feel doing it.
Questions
Was Gan Jiang a real person?
Gan Jiang appears in classical Chinese texts, but the stories about him are full of legend, and they differ from one source to another. It is safest to treat him as a legendary figure.
How do you pronounce 干将?
In Mandarin it is roughly “gahn jyahng”, written Gān Jiāng in pinyin. His wife’s name, 莫邪, is usually read Mò Yé.
Is the app only for people who know the legend?
Not at all. The name is a nod to the idea of forging, and the app works the same in English and Simplified Chinese whether or not you know the story.