Soul System

The Soul System is how Sylva learns who you are — your communication style, preferences, working patterns, and boundaries — and uses that understanding to become a more effective assistant over time.

How the Soul System Works

Every time you interact with Sylva, it picks up on patterns. Maybe you prefer bullet-point summaries over long paragraphs. Maybe you make decisions quickly when data is clear but slow down when stakeholders are involved. Maybe you protect your mornings for deep work. Sylva notices these things, records them as observations, and periodically synthesizes them into a coherent personality profile called a soul document.

This means Sylva doesn't start from scratch every conversation. It carries forward what it's learned and adapts how it communicates, what it prioritizes, and how it frames information — all based on you.

Two Types of Souls

The Soul System has two distinct sides:

• Agent Soul — Governs how Sylva communicates with you. This is Sylva's own personality profile: its tone, level of detail, how it structures responses, and when it proactively offers help. As Sylva learns more about your preferences, the Agent Soul evolves to match the communication style that works best for you.
• User Soul — A profile of you. This captures your behavioral patterns, decision-making tendencies, preferences, boundaries, and more. Sylva references the User Soul to understand context that you shouldn't have to repeat — like the fact that you prefer async updates over meetings, or that Q4 is your busiest quarter.

Both souls grow and change as Sylva collects more observations.

Observations

Observations are the building blocks of the Soul System — individual behavioral notes that Sylva captures during your conversations. Each observation is categorized into one of several types:

• Communication — How you prefer to give and receive information
• Decisions — How you approach choices, trade-offs, and prioritization
• Preferences — Your likes, dislikes, and default choices
• Boundaries — Lines you've drawn around time, topics, or processes
• Growth — Goals, learning areas, and things you're working to improve
• Relationships — How you interact with specific people or teams
• Energy — When and how you do your best work
• Focus — What you pay attention to and what you tend to deprioritize

Sylva captures observations automatically, but you don't have to take its word for anything — every observation is visible, editable, and removable.

Telling Sylva About Yourself

You don't have to wait for Sylva to figure things out. Use the "Sylva, you should know..." input form to tell Sylva something directly. This is useful for things that might not come up naturally in conversation — like "I'm the interim lead on the platform team until March" or "I have a hard stop at 5pm every day for school pickup."

Type your statement into the form and submit it. Sylva creates an observation immediately and factors it into your User Soul the next time it synthesizes.

Editing and Removing Observations

Sylva doesn't always get it right. If an observation is inaccurate, outdated, or too broadly stated, you can fix it.

1. Find the observation in your User Soul observations list
2. Click the edit button on the observation card
3. Update the text, change the category, or adjust any details
4. Save your changes

To remove an observation entirely, click the remove action on the observation card. Removed observations aren't permanently deleted — you can reveal them later using the filter controls (see Filtering below). This gives you a safety net if you remove something by mistake or change your mind.

Confidence Scores

Each observation has a confidence score that reflects how certain Sylva is about that behavioral note. Confidence increases when Sylva sees the same pattern repeated across multiple conversations and decreases when your behavior contradicts an earlier observation.

Confidence scores are displayed as a visual bar chart on each observation, making it easy to scan which observations are well-established and which are still tentative. Low-confidence observations carry less weight during synthesis — so a pattern Sylva noticed once won't override something it's seen dozens of times.

Soul Documents

The soul document is the synthesized result — a coherent personality profile built from all of your observations. Think of it as the "big picture" that Sylva references when deciding how to help you.

Sylva periodically synthesizes observations into an updated soul document automatically. Each synthesis produces a new version, and you can browse the full version history to see how your profile has evolved over time.

Synthesize Now

If you've added or edited several observations and want Sylva to incorporate them right away — rather than waiting for the next automatic synthesis — click the Synthesize Now button.

This triggers an on-demand synthesis that processes all current observations into a fresh soul document. A new version appears in your version history, and Sylva immediately starts using the updated profile. This is especially useful after a major life or role change when you've updated many observations at once.

Filtering Observations

As your observation list grows, filters help you find what you're looking for.

• Filter by category — Select one or more categories (Communication, Decisions, Preferences, etc.) to narrow the list to observations of that type
• Show removed observations — Toggle this on to reveal observations you've previously removed. From here you can restore any observation you want Sylva to consider again

Filtering doesn't affect what Sylva uses during synthesis — it only controls what you see on screen. Active observations are always included in synthesis regardless of your current filter view.