SOUL Atlas
Open · MIT License · 313 SOULs and growing

How experts think.

A SOUL captures the tacit knowledge of a practitioner — the goals, instincts, mental models, tradeoffs, and judgment behind a way of thinking. Not documentation. Not a prompt. A portrait of a mind at work.

Press ⌘K to search · 737,051 words of distilled expertise

What is a SOUL?

Documentation answers “what does an architect know?” A SOUL answers “how does an excellent architect think?” Each SOUL is a structured Markdown file that distills a way of thinking into its mental models, decision frameworks, heuristics, failure modes, and the questions an expert keeps running in the background.

A SOUL is not documentation

Docs describe a system or a procedure. A SOUL describes the judgment that chooses between procedures — why an expert reaches for one tool over another when no rule applies.

A SOUL is not a prompt

A prompt instructs a model for one task. A SOUL is a durable, human-readable artifact about a domain — useful on its own, citable, and versioned — that can ground a prompt but isn't one.

For humans and AI alike

Read one to onboard into a field in an afternoon. Or feed the machine-readable JSON API to a system that needs to reason the way a domain expert would.

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