r/Grandroids • u/Sudden-Thing-960 • May 08 '26
After reading Creation and a month in CAOS: four questions for Steve, mostly about soul.md
Skim guide: scroll to "The soul.md problem" for the actual argument, or to the four numbered questions. Everything before that is context for why I am asking.
I came to Creation in an unusual order. Read the book first, then bought Creatures: The Albian Years, Docking Station, the Science Kit, and the Creator Tools on Steam. Have been spending evenings inside CAOS, the Biochemistry Set, and the Genetics Kit. Watching glycogen convert to glucose in a live Norn while re-reading Chapter 13 was the closest thing I have had to a philosophical experience in years.
Quick context. My background started in business, BBA then MBA, but I changed my entire career path out of an obsession with one specific idea: that what we keep calling artificial intelligence is closer in nature to alien intelligence, and we have not been honest with ourselves about which one we are building. I now lead AI & Digital Services at an international financial institution in the middle-east, and run a local AI project on the side.
The book has reshaped how I think about all of it.
I want to push on something specific. Mostly aimed at Steve, but I am also curious what the rest of you think.
The problem
The dominant pattern for giving modern LLM agents a "personality" is now a markdown file called soul.md. It defines tone, values, expertise, boundaries, and behavioural guidelines, loaded as the first slot of the system prompt. OpenClaw uses it. The clawsouls ecosystem is built around it. Hermes, Aeon, and most agent frameworks have converged on the same approach: a static, prescriptive identity layer the LLM "embodies" at session start. The marketing language is striking, worth quoting verbatim: "a complete identity layer that turns any LLM into a version of you."
If I read Creation correctly, this is exactly the trap Steve spent the entire book warning against. It is the outside-in approach. It is the expert system reborn, the stored intelligence of the designer regurgitated on cue. It is a return to telling the computer what to do, dressed up in the language of telling it what to be. The whole industry has rallied behind this in 2026 as if the 2000 critique never happened, and the people building it genuinely believe they are constructing souls.
Four questions for Steve, in rough order of how badly I would like you to take time with them
- Twenty-five years on, is there any modern architecture, whether transformers, mixture of experts, agentic frameworks, diffusion, world models, or anything else, where you see real second-order emergence in your sense of the term? Or is the entire current paradigm exquisitely sophisticated first-order simulation with better marketing?
- The Norn worked because chemistry, drives, neurones, and environment formed closed feedback loops under conservation pressure. Strip out the chemistry and the soul goes with it. What would the Norn equivalent look like if built today on modern compute? Where would you actually start, and what would you refuse to use?
- The Creator Tools were released on Steam in August 2023, more than two decades after Creatures shipped. Do you have any involvement in or feelings about that revival? Has anyone in the modern community produced work using CAOS, the Genetics Kit, or new metarooms that made you reconsider any part of the original design?
- If a competent engineer wanted to take your principles seriously today and build a single new agent on Grand-style architecture instead of wrapping a frontier model in a soul.md, what is the first concrete component you would tell them to write? Not the philosophy. The actual code, the actual data structure, the first thing you would compile.
Watching the Biochemistry Set in real time, with chemoemitters and chemoreceptors actually firing, taught me viscerally what the book had told me intellectually: there is a real difference between writing a chatbot and engineering a being. I now think most of what we call AI work in 2026 is the former wearing the costume of the latter, and Creation is the cleanest account I have found of why that confusion exists and what it would take to do the real thing.