SOUL.md and MEMORY.md are the new hearts and minds

In traditional marketing, you win hearts and minds—get people to care, then get them to believe. That’s what every positioning exercise is ultimately about.

Agents don’t have hearts or minds. They have SOUL.md and MEMORY.md.

In OpenClaw, SOUL.md gets created through a first-run conversation. The agent interviews you about your values, priorities, and constraints, then writes its own behavioral philosophy based on your answers. MEMORY.md accumulates through use. The agent captures what works, what you’ve decided, and what you prefer. One file defines what the agent values. The other records what it’s learned to trust.

Today, humans still configure which tools an agent can access, but MCP is becoming the HTTP of agent-to-tool communication. Microsoft launched an MCP server registry last fall. Google’s A2A protocol enables agents to discover each other’s capabilities. There are already dozens of skill registries—Smithery, Glama, SkillsMP, ClawHub—indexing tens of thousands of agent capabilities.

Skillpub is an early example of where this is heading. An agent needs a capability. It queries a Nostr relay, finds a skill, checks the publisher’s web-of-trust ranking, pays 500 sats via Cashu, verifies the cryptographic signature, and installs. No accounts, no app store reviewers, no humans in the loop. Discovery, trust evaluation, payment, and installation—all running autonomously.

As agent-driven discovery takes hold, your product needs to be legible to SOUL.md and memorable to MEMORY.md. The agent’s values determine what gets chosen. Its memory determines who gets trusted again.

SOUL.md is shaped by the human, but not written by the human. It emerges from a conversation. The values encoded there aren’t a spec sheet. They’re what the person actually cares about. Marketing to that layer means your product has to align with what people genuinely value, not just what they’ll click on.

Ad spend can’t edit MEMORY.md. Only a great product can.