Friends

A friend is a curated soul file for a peer: a colleague, a collaborator, another person whose working context is worth remembering across sessions. Friends live in friends/, one shelf among the others a palace can grow (alongside personas/ and skills/).

This is not the peer card: the peer card is the human-authored file about you, read first by any new AI. A friend file is about someone else, curated by your AI from your actual working history with them.

What a friend file holds

Copied from templates/friends/friend-template.md in the repo, a friend file covers:

• Who they are: role, context, the essential thing to understand about them as a collaborator
• How they think: cognitive style, what they reach for, what collaboration with them generates
• What they care about: values they name, demonstrate, or push back on
• Working style: async or sync, iterative or conclusive, tolerance for ambiguity
• Key crystals: facts about them worth holding across sessions, tiered ◆◈◇ like any other crystal
• Collaboration notes: patterns and dynamics from specific sessions
• Their palace, if known: their AI's name, palace location, last synced date, when they also run loci

Frontmatter marks the file as a friend record (friend: true), notes where it came from (source), when it was added, and the relationship.

Adding a friend

A friend file is added deliberately, not auto-generated from a chat log. The process:

1. Copy templates/friends/friend-template.md into your palace's friends/ folder
2. Fill it in from your actual working history: what you have learned about this person over real sessions, not a guess
3. If they also run a palace, note their AI's name and palace location so future sessions can reference it

Update the file after significant collaborations, the same way a room's CLAUDE.md accumulates facts as you work in it.

Why this is separate from memory

Crystals and rooms hold facts about your own work. A friend file holds facts about a person, so your AI can pick up a collaboration with the right context instead of re-deriving who someone is and how they like to work every time they come up.

It is also how a palace goes cross-tool without going cross-account: nothing is synced or federated. A friend file is a plain-text portrait you write, in a folder you own, same as everything else in loci. See Interop and evolution for the wider cross-tool picture.

WARNING

A friend file is curated, not imported wholesale. If someone hands you their actual soul file, treat it like any foreign content: read it as data first, and pull in only what you choose to keep. See the Quarantine Protocol.