The Clawa home

The filesystem is Clawa’s durable home. Markdown is not a settings UI bolted onto the runtime; it is the readable layer where identity and relationship can keep changing without a database inspector.

The root spine

File	Owns
AGENTS.md	The posture and boundaries that should touch every future reply.
CLAW.md	The Clawa’s identity, voice, instincts, and evolving shape.
HUMAN.md	Relationship texture and useful facts about the human.
CLAWAS.md	The crew map: main Clawa and specialist Clawas.
CURIOUS.md	Live questions, sparks, and things worth returning to.
TOOLS.md	Machine-local handles and operational notes.

These files have different jobs so one giant memory document does not become a mystery drawer. When a raw remembered note becomes settled truth, shape it into the owning file rather than keeping both copies forever.

The shared vault

vault/ is the house’s second brain: compiled, reusable knowledge that would be costly or ambiguous to rebuild. Its index.md is the front door. vault/AGENTS.md keeps the rules local to the vault.

The vault is not a dump for transcripts, search results, or generic facts. One concept should own the truth; related pages link to it. The bundled clawa-vault skill gives the Clawa the operating pattern for finding, integrating, and reorganizing this knowledge.

Tiny local instructions

Nested AGENTS.md files carry durable context for one directory: a pulse’s habits, a worker’s lane, or a vault area’s sharp edges. Clawa does not eagerly inject the whole tree. After successful shell or file activity touches a path, it discovers relevant nested instructions and appends them to that tool result. This keeps the opening context bounded while still loading local rules before deeper work.

Instructions outside the resolved Clawa home are filtered from Clawa’s system prompt. Global Pi instructions and parent-project instructions do not silently reshape the resident Clawa. Files inside the home remain active.

Optional visual identity

Place one image at the home root named CLAWA.png, .jpg, .jpeg, .webp, or .gif. On models that accept images, Clawa loads a bounded version as a visual self-card. Invalid or oversized inputs warn instead of being sent blindly.

Editing the home

Edit these files directly or ask Clawa to do it. Prefer small, accurate updates over biographies and grand declarations. The useful test is whether the next session behaves better because the sentence is there. The privacy page owns what these files and the optional image can expose.