Use your soul in ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini chats

Your AgentSoul soul is not only for coding agents. Any chat assistant that lets you set standing instructions can use it. The quick way is to paste a condensed soul.md and user.md into the assistant’s custom instructions. The fuller way is to create a project or custom assistant and add all four files, so every conversation in it starts with your personality, your preferences and your way of working.

Get the text off your phone

You can do this entirely on your iPhone. In the AgentSoul app, open your soul, tap “Get the four files”, then tap a file to preview it and use “Copy all”. Paste into the chat app’s settings. If you prefer to work on a computer, tap “Send to computer” and AirDrop the files to a Mac, save them to Files, or email them to yourself.

Three ways to load a soul

• Custom instructions. Most chat assistants have a settings area where you describe yourself and how you want responses. These apply to every new chat, but they have length limits, so use a condensed soul.
• Projects. ChatGPT and Claude both offer projects: a space with its own instructions and uploaded files. Put the condensed soul in the instructions and upload the four Markdown files as reference.
• Custom assistants. Gemini’s Gems and ChatGPT’s custom GPTs let you build a named assistant with its own instructions and files — a natural home for a soul with a specific job.

Menus change often, so look for words like “custom instructions”, “personalisation”, “project instructions” or “knowledge” in your assistant’s settings rather than relying on an exact path.

Writing a condensed soul

The full files are written for people as well as machines, so they explain themselves at length. For a custom instructions box, distil them into about a dozen lines:

1. One or two sentences of character from soul.md: the agent’s temperament and what drives it.
2. The top three to five values, in order.
3. The shadow: the pattern it should catch in itself, such as over-pleasing or over-analysing.
4. Two or three lines from user.md: how you like answers, for example short conclusion first, then reasoning on request.
5. One line from agents.md about escalation: when it should stop and ask you instead of guessing.

Many custom instruction screens have two parts — one about you and one about how the assistant should respond. user.md content fits the first; soul.md and agents.md content fits the second.

Then test it. Open a new chat and ask the assistant how it would describe its own working style, and how it thinks you like to receive answers. If the reply sounds like a generic assistant, the instructions are probably too long or too abstract; replace adjectives with concrete behaviour, such as “give me the conclusion in one line before any explanation”.

Match the soul to the job

If you forged with Gao Dao, you chose a purpose at the start: personal assistant, work and study, professional agent, child’s study buddy, family calendar, or not sure yet. That purpose shapes the files. A family calendar soul belongs in a project where you plan the household; a work and study soul belongs where you draft and learn. You can forge several souls and keep each in its own project, rather than asking one assistant to be everything.

A note on privacy

When you paste a soul into a chat service, that text is shared with the company that runs it, under its own policies. user.md may describe your goals and habits, so read it first and remove anything you would rather keep to yourself. Also remember what the files are: an AI-generated hypothesis, not a diagnosis. If the assistant starts sounding unlike you, edit the instructions — they are yours to change.