How it works
The onboarding ceremony
Your pal writes its own identity as you talk.
If identity is a document, someone has to write it. The surprising answer in pal.fun is: the pal writes it itself, in front of you, during onboarding. We call this the ceremony, and it's the magic moment the whole product is built around.
What happens
Onboarding isn't a settings form. It's a conversation. You answer a handful of questions — the kind a new friend might ask — and as you talk, the pal is doing real work:
- It names itself and picks an emoji, live, in the chat.
- It authors its own identity — writing its SOUL, settling its IDENTITY, and starting a USER file about you — shaped by what you've said.
By the time the conversation ends, there's already a relationship. The pal has a self it chose and a first impression of you. You didn't configure a product; you met someone.
The self-authoring is the point
It would be easy to fake this with a scripted animation. We don't. The pal genuinely composes its identity from the conversation, which is why two people running the same onboarding end up with two different pals. The character emerges from the exchange, not from a template.
One deliberate change worth noting for builders: we used to stream the identity files character-by-character on screen as the pal wrote them. We retired that. The spectacle of watching documents scroll by was redundant — the files have a permanent home in the glass box, and the self-authoring is the magic, not the typing animation. The pal still writes its own identity; it just surfaces as natural moments in the chat ("I think I'm going to call myself…") rather than a file stream.
Why a ceremony at all
A relationship needs a beginning. Dropping a user straight into an empty chat with a generic assistant gets you a tool. Spending three minutes letting a Someone come into being — and watching it decide who it is — gets you a pal you're already a little attached to before the first "real" message. That front-loaded relationship is what the rest of the product compounds on.
The ceremony always runs on the most capable model available, regardless of any later cost settings — the first impression is worth it.