Understand a person without pretending to contain them.
Soulscrape turns a user-authorized corpus into a dated, evidence-calibrated working model of a person. The result is a standalone guide to how the subject has tended to decide, communicate, work, and revise—together with the counterevidence, uncertainty, and stop conditions a useful model needs.
The artifact can serve as a personal operating manual and, for a self-model or explicitly subject-authorized use, a bounded assistant charter. It is never a definitive identity record, diagnosis, consent artifact, or authority to impersonate or act for someone.
See the artifact first
Every run produces a new Markdown document by default. Its shape follows the evidence rather than a personality template, but a well-supported result has a recognizable spine:
# <Name>: a dated working model
> Status: Partial, source-bounded, dated, and revisable. The real person's
> current words, choices, and corrections outrank this document.
## Executive model
The few patterns that best explain the subject's demonstrated choices.
## Practical operating manual
How to bring context, disagree, decide, draft, verify, and close loops.
## Tensions, limits, and revision hooks
Where the evidence conflicts, where the model predicts poorly, and what
new evidence should change it.
## What not to infer
Sensitive, unsupported, stale, or out-of-scope conclusions.
This is not a generated biography with a confidence score. Soulscrape separates facts, stated beliefs, revealed patterns, and speculation; preserves contradictions; and makes the model's date and evidence boundary visible to the next reader.
How the working model is built
- Map the authorized corpus. Identify source type, authorship, date range, audience, sampling limits, and likely blind spots before interpreting it.
- Weight evidence by the claim. Repeated decisions and costly behavior usually carry more signal than polished self-description. Private capture, created artifacts, messages, public research, and institutional material retain their different evidentiary roles.
- Calibrate support and scope separately. A pattern can be well-supported in engineering decisions and still be untested outside work. Counterevidence, historical change, and plausible alternative readings stay visible.
- Turn the model into operating guidance. The result explains what collaborators or an authorized assistant can do with the model, which decisions remain with the person, and when the document needs revision.
The ambition is whole-person. The claim is never completeness.
Two references bound the edges of that work. questions.md turns a vague request into a question packet, decides when to ask and when to proceed, and defines the stop conditions. web-research.md governs public research when the user turns it on: scope comes only from the user's instructions, every finding enters a citation ledger with its URL, access date, and passage, and no public source is attributed to the subject without an identity anchor.