Most interactions with an LLM are shallow by default.
You ask a question. It gives an answer. Maybe the answer is decent, maybe it is generic, but either way the model is usually working with a limited picture of who you are, what matters to you, and how you want it to behave.
If you want more control over the model, you have to give it more context.
That is the idea behind Soul Buckets.
At a systems level, Soul Buckets are a structured way to provide an LLM with a much richer identity layer so it has more to work with and more behavioral guidance to follow.
If you really wanted to, you could use that structure to bring someone to life, or at least recreate their style, preferences, priorities, and perspective to the best of the model's ability.
That is not magic. It is context architecture.
What Are Soul Buckets?
A Soul Bucket is a JSON-structured identity profile: a set of categories that encode who a person is across multiple dimensions. When loaded into a model's context, that information can influence how the model responds, what it emphasizes, and how closely it aligns to a given individual.
{
"identity": {
"name": "Jed",
"role": "AI Consultant & Founder",
"values": ["clarity", "purpose", "authenticity", "continuous_learning"]
},
"health": {
"current_goals": ["consistent sleep schedule", "daily movement"],
"challenges": ["desk-bound work hours", "high cognitive load days"]
},
"career": {
"current_focus": "scaling JedAI consulting practice",
"industry": "AI / Technology",
"stage": "founder / early growth"
},
"learning": {
"active_interests": ["AI agent architecture", "stoic philosophy", "systems thinking"],
"preferred_format": "applied examples over theory"
},
"spiritual": {
"orientation": "secular mindfulness with Buddhist influence",
"practices": ["meditation", "journaling"]
},
"vision": {
"5_year": "Build a recognized AI consulting brand with recurring enterprise clients",
"core_fear": "building something technically impressive but commercially irrelevant"
}
}
The Nine Buckets
The framework organizes identity across nine domains:
- Metadata — Core identity: name, role, values
- Health — Physical and mental state, goals, challenges
- Career — Current work, industry, ambitions
- Learning — Active interests, preferred formats, knowledge gaps
- Spiritual — Orientation, practices, meaning-making frameworks
- Lifestyle — Routines, environment, energy patterns
- Vision — Long-term goals, fears, definitions of success
- Social — Key relationships, communication style, support network
- Tech — Tools used, technical depth, platform preferences
The exact buckets can change. What matters is that the structure is rich enough to shape behavior in a meaningful way.
How It Changes the Interaction
Without Soul Buckets, asking "how should I think about my pricing strategy?" gets a generic answer about value-based pricing and market research.
With Soul Buckets loaded, the same question gets an answer that knows:
- You're a founder at an early growth stage
- Your core fear is building something technically impressive but commercially irrelevant
- You value clarity over complexity
- You're scaling a consulting practice with enterprise clients
The answer is different. It's specific. It feels like it was written for you — because it was.
Why This Matters
This is not necessarily about creating a better future for human-computer interaction in some abstract sense.
It is about control.
The more useful context you provide to an LLM, the more influence you have over how it behaves.
That matters if you want:
- More personalized outputs
- Stronger consistency
- Better simulation of a person's style or point of view
- More controlled agent behavior
- Richer context for decision-making
In other words, Soul Buckets are not just about making the model feel more personal. They are about making the model more configurable.
Bringing Someone to Life
This is where the concept gets interesting.
If you provide enough structured information about a person, their values, preferences, communication style, goals, fears, habits, and operating logic, the model can start to approximate that person much more convincingly.
Not perfectly. But far more effectively than a generic prompt ever could.
That is the real power of Soul Buckets. They give you a structured way to build personality into the system so the model has enough material to act on.
That can be used for personalization, simulation, creative projects, or more controlled agent design.