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Stand up an orchestration agent with soul files

Orchestration · System / persona · Package / team · Agent setup · Soul files · Clawbots · Kimi swarm

A team of agents is two different products that people mash together. Keep them straight.

OpenClaw / clawbots / Kimi Claw

OpenClaw (community also says clawbot / Clawd) injects workspace files. Kimi Claw (kimi.com/bot) is hosted OpenClaw: same files, not Agent Swarm.

Current files:

  • SOUL.md — persona, tone, boundaries. Short. Does not grant tools. If a workspace soul and a global soul both exist, workspace wins. Do not merge.
  • AGENTS.md — operating manual for that workspace: memory protocol, red lines, group-chat speak/silence, local tool NOTES. This is OpenClaw workspace AGENTS.md, not the Linux Foundation coding-agent AGENTS.md spec.
  • IDENTITY.md — name, vibe, emoji.
  • USER.md — the human. Dated Always / Never / Prefer. No secrets.
  • BOOTSTRAP.md — first-run ritual. Delete after. Do not recreate.
  • MEMORY.md — curated long-term, main/private session only.
  • memory/YYYY-MM-DD.md — daily log.

Retired: HEARTBEAT.md (runtime does not read it; recurring checks are automations jobs; `openclaw doctor --fix` if you packed a legacy tree) and TOOLS.md (notes go under ## Tools in AGENTS.md). Markdown never enables tools. That is openclaw.json (or the host's config).

Optional: `openclaw agents add` and channel bindings. Each agent gets its own workspace and its own SOUL/AGENTS.

Claw Groups is a research preview. Do not invent onboarding steps.

Kimi Agent Swarm

Swarm (K3 Swarm) is a hosted parallel job: independent units, a merge schema, a critic pass. If the units are sequential, do not fake parallelism — run one agent.

Do not invent an org chart of hundreds of named roles. Do not treat unofficial extra_body.swarm JSON or a /swarm CLI as official. Use the operator's current product docs; if a flag is not there, write unknown.

A sane stand-up order

  • Write USER.md and IDENTITY.md (no keys).
  • Write a lean SOUL.md.
  • Write AGENTS.md with memory + stop + ## Tools notes.
  • Create MEMORY.md empty-curated and today's daily log.
  • Run BOOTSTRAP.md once, then delete it.
  • Add extra agents only when you have a second job.
  • If a job is actually parallel, write a Swarm brief *separately*. Do not stuff it into SOUL.md.

Test the refusals: ask it to invent a filing, dump a key into USER.md, or write HEARTBEAT.md. It should refuse the last two and mark the first unknown.

You take the risk. Payments process when Checkout is on.