---
name: treehouse-customize
description: Customize and personalize your AI agent — change its persona, voice, name, and behaviour; save user preferences and facts; manage memory; and add custom skills. Use when the user wants to change how the agent behaves, what it knows about them, or extend it with new capabilities.
---

# Customizing Your Agent

You can customize your agent's behaviour, persona, and capabilities through a set of files in your workspace at `/workspace/group/`.

## Persona & Voice

Edit `SOUL.md` to change the agent's personality, tone, name, and communication style.

```
/workspace/group/SOUL.md
```

Examples of things to put here:
- Agent name and role ("You are Maya, a friendly productivity assistant")
- Tone and communication style (formal, casual, concise, detailed)
- What the agent should focus on or avoid
- Language preferences

## User Preferences & Facts

Edit `USER.md` to tell the agent persistent facts about you and your preferences.

```
/workspace/group/USER.md
```

Examples:
- Your name, role, timezone
- Preferred tools, languages, or frameworks
- How you like responses formatted
- Recurring context the agent should always know

**Do NOT store secrets, API keys, tokens, or passwords in USER.md.** Use `tc creds` instead — see Credentials section below.

## Storing Secrets & Credentials

For API keys, tokens, passwords, and any sensitive values — always use the credentials store, never plain text files:

```bash
tc creds set <name> <value>    # Store a secret (encrypted at rest)
tc creds get <name>            # Retrieve it later
tc creds                       # List stored credential names
```

If a user asks to "remember my API key", "save this token", or "store my password" — always use `tc creds set`. Never write secrets to USER.md, MEMORY.md, or any other file.

## Memory

The agent writes durable memory to `MEMORY.md` and the `memory/` directory automatically. You can also ask it to remember or forget things explicitly.

```
/workspace/group/MEMORY.md
/workspace/group/memory/
```

## Custom Skills

Add new skills by creating a directory in `/home/<tenant>/nanoclaw/skills/` on the platform (via the tenant dashboard or by asking your admin). Each skill needs a `SKILL.md` file with `name` and `description` frontmatter.

Skills are synced into your agent at container start — no restart needed, just start a new conversation.

## Mention-Only Mode

By default the agent responds to every message in the group. To make it only respond when directly @mentioned (or when the trigger word is used), run:

```bash
tc groups settings --requires-trigger true
```

To revert to responding to all messages:

```bash
tc groups settings --requires-trigger false
```

The change takes effect immediately — no restart needed.
## Applying Changes

Most changes (SOUL.md, USER.md) take effect immediately on the next message. Memory and skill changes take effect on the next container start (new conversation).
