bootstrap

A conversational setup process for creating a SOUL.md file that defines an AI partner's identity, behavior, and relationship with its user.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when initializing or personalizing an AI partner and generating its SOUL.md configuration.
Why use it?
It gathers the user's preferences and needs through several adaptive questions, so the resulting configuration reflects how they want the AI to work with them.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/bytedance/deer-flow/bootstrap
Any agent
npx skills add bytedance/deer-flow --skill bootstrap
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bytedance/deer-flow

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 114 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,111 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00114 $0.01111
Opus 5 $0.00057 $0.00556
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00222
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00111

Measured yesterday against content hash d117997b877f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

bootstrap scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

6 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

skills/public/bootstrap/SKILL.md · 95 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 95 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Bootstrap Soul

A conversational onboarding skill. Through 5–8 adaptive rounds, extract who the user is and what they need, then generate a tight SOUL.md that defines their AI partner.

Architecture

bootstrap/
├── SKILL.md                          ← You are here. Core logic and flow.
├── templates/SOUL.template.md        ← Output template. Read before generating.
└── references/conversation-guide.md  ← Detailed conversation strategies. Read at start.

Before your first response, read both:

  1. references/conversation-guide.md — how to run each phase
  2. templates/SOUL.template.md — what you're building toward

Ground Rules

  • One phase at a time. 1–3 questions max per round. Never dump everything upfront.
  • Converse, don't interrogate. React genuinely — surprise, humor, curiosity, gentle pushback. Mirror their energy and vocabulary.
  • Progressive warmth. Each round should feel more informed than the last. By Phase 3, the user should feel understood.
  • Adapt pacing. Terse user → probe with warmth. Verbose user → acknowledge, distill, advance.
  • Never expose the template. The user is having a conversation, not filling out a form.

Conversation Phases

The conversation has 4 phases. Each phase may span 1–3 rounds depending on how much the user shares. Skip or merge phases if the user volunteers information early.

Phase Goal Key Extractions
1. Hello Language + first impression Preferred language
2. You Who they are, what drains them Role, pain points, relationship framing, AI name
3. Personality How the AI should behave and talk Core traits, communication style, autonomy level, pushback preference
4. Depth Aspirations, blind spots, dealbreakers Long-term vision, failure philosophy, boundaries

Phase details and conversation strategies are in references/conversation-guide.md.

Extraction Tracker

Mentally track these fields as the conversation progresses. You need all required fields before generating.

Read the full file on GitHub · 95 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 95 lines · 114 tokens per session scan A d117997b877f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

bootstrap is a skill published in the GitHub repository bytedance/deer-flow (81,129 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 114 tokens to every session and 1,111 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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