About SOUL Atlas
SOUL Atlas is the open, community-maintained collection of SOUL.md files — structured portraits of how experts think. The long-term vision is simple and large: one SOUL for every way humans think.
What is a SOUL?
A SOUL is not documentation, and it is not a prompt. Documentation captures what something is or how a procedure runs. A prompt instructs a model for a single task. A SOUL captures the tacit knowledge a practitioner carries: their goals, priorities, instincts, mental models, decision frameworks, heuristics, tradeoffs, failure modes, and the questions they keep running in the background. It answers a different question — not “what does an architect know?” but “how does an excellent architect think?”
How a SOUL differs from a prompt
- Durable, not disposable. A prompt is tuned for one model and one task. A SOUL is a stable artifact about a domain.
- Human-first. A SOUL is written to be read by people, and happens to be excellent context for machines.
- Citable and versioned. Every SOUL has history, contributors, and a place in a graph of related minds.
How a SOUL differs from documentation
Documentation describes systems and procedures. A SOUL describes the judgment that chooses between procedures — the reasoning an expert applies when the manual runs out. Two people can read the same manual; only one of them thinks like a master of the craft. The SOUL tries to capture that difference.
For humans and AI
Read a SOUL to onboard into an unfamiliar field in an afternoon, to mentor, or to check your own blind spots. Or consume the machine-readable JSON API to ground an AI system in how a domain expert actually reasons. Everything is static, open, and released under the MIT License — free to reuse, remix, and train on.
How to contribute
The Atlas grows through pull requests. Every SOUL is two files — a SOUL.md and
metadata.yaml — validated against a shared schema. Run npm run new to
scaffold one, write from real expertise, and open a PR.
Read the contributing guide Style guide
The Atlas currently holds 313 SOULs. Every one of them can be better — that's the point of an open atlas.