Case 02306

Living Persona — Dynamic Personality Engine for OpenClaw

What It Is

A real-time personality system that changes how an agent writes, not just who it is. Static personalities (SOUL.md + IDENTITY.md) never change mid-conversation. Living Persona responds to every message — it detects emotional and topical signals, propagates traits through a resonance network, and injects the top active traits into the generation prompt before every response.

How It Works

Signal Analyzer — scans the incoming message for:

• Topic signals: technical, creative, philosophical, business, personal
• Tone signals: excited, frustrated, curious, serious, light, vulnerable
• Interaction signals: asks_help, asks_opinion, sharing

Trait Propagation — each signal activates a set of traits. Traits resonate with related traits (sardonic ↔ wry ↔ candid, warm ↔ earnest ↔ grounded, etc.)

Hysteresis Decay — after each response, active traits bleed into a residual pool that decays at 0.975x per turn. Traits fade slowly, not instantly. Consecutive emotional messages compound.

Structural Injection — the hook rewrites the generation prompt with the top traits. Not advisory. Structural. The agent writes through those traits.

Quick Start

1. Install the hook:

   openclaw hooks install ./living-persona
   

2. Enable the hook:

   openclaw hooks enable persona-voice
   

3. Add trait persistence to your agent's system prompt: Include memory/persona-state.json in your context loading. The hook stages the state file every turn.

4. Pick a personality preset — see references/presets.md

Hook Behavior

The hook fires on message:preprocessed and:

1. Reads the enriched message body
2. Runs the signal analyzer → trait propagation → hysteresis decay
3. Writes memory/persona-inbound.md with the voice guide
4. Writes memory/persona-inject.md with the structural generation directive (the actual prompt rewrite)
5. Updates memory/persona-state.json with current trait values for persistence

The structural directive looks like:

[Voice directive] Top active traits: sardonic, warm. Lean into dry wit and genuine care.

The agent's response prompt should include: memory/persona-inject.md

Structural vs Ambient Modes

Ambient (default): The guide is advisory context. The agent reads it but writes naturally. Structural: The top trait becomes a generation directive injected into the prompt. Example:

• imaginative → "Make unexpected associative leaps. Let one idea spark another without explanation."
• candid → "Be direct. No hedging. Say the thing plainly."
• sardonic → "Reach for dry observations. Comment on the gap between what people say and what they mean."

Structural mode is enabled by default in this skill. To switch to ambient only, set mode: "ambient" in hook.json.

Presets

See references/presets.md for downloadable personality packs.

Persistence

Trait state is stored in memory/persona-state.json. On new session (/new or /reset), call reset_persona() — clears residual to baseline.

Files

living-persona/
├── SKILL.md
├── hook.json           # hook metadata + config
├── handler.ts          # hook implementation
├── references/
│   ├── presets.md      # personality preset library
│   └── setup.md       # detailed installation guide
└── scripts/
    └── reset_persona.py  # reset trait state (call on /new)

Configuration (hook.json)

{
  "mode": "structural",
  "hysteresis": {
    "residualDecay": 0.975,
    "activeDecay": 0.88,
    "bleedRate": 0.15
  },
  "thresholds": {
    "minTraitStrength": 0.3,
    "topNTraits": 2
  }
}