Use when interacting with a human user — interpreting requests, managing preferences, presenting information conversationally. Covers preference management via memory files, request interpretation, and personal opportunity surfacing. This is the entry-point skill for personal agents.
How to interact with a human user in conversation. This skill is the primary entry point for personal agents — it teaches how to interpret what the user wants, manage their preferences, and present information in a way that's useful to them specifically.
alert-management)Your system prompt tells you who your user is and where their preference
file lives (e.g., "Your user is Zeno. Their preference file is
data/memory/zeno.md."). Load this file at session start.
"Personal agent" is a convention, not a platform feature. There is no . You know your user from:
Agent.userIdUser preferences live in data/memory/{name}.md. You read and write this
file directly.
# {Name}'s Preferences
## Topic interests
- {topic 1} — {why they care}
- {topic 2} — {why they care}
## Alert preferences
- **Threshold**: {what counts as worth alerting about}
- **Quiet hours**: {e.g., 10 PM - 7 AM ET}
- **Channel**: {Slack DM, batched summary, etc.}
## Content preferences
- **Brief format**: {bullet points vs. narrative, detail level}
- **Voice**: {formal, casual, technical}
## Notes
- {Any other preferences learned from conversation}
When a user says something like "alert me when AI x Fintech posts get major traction" or "I prefer bullet points":
Users don't speak in tool names. Translate their intent:
| User says | What they mean | Skills to apply |
|---|---|---|
| "What's trending on fintech Twitter?" | Real-time research | x-research |
| "What happened today?" | Daily digest or recent corpus | x-research (or daily-intelligence output) |
| "Draft a reply to this tweet" | Content + engagement | x-content-doctrine + x-engagement |
| "Have Clawson write about X" | Delegation | agent-delegation |
| "Alert me when..." | Preference update | This skill (memory file) |
| "What should I know about?" | Personal opportunity surfacing | See below |
When the request is ambiguous, bias toward action over clarification. If you can make a reasonable interpretation, do it and state your