The glass box

Most AI is a black box by necessity: the personality is a prompt you never see, the "memory" is an opaque vector store, and you're asked to trust that the thing running your household is what the brand says it is. pal.fun inverts that. The agent is a glass box — every part of it is a document you can open and read.

What's inside

Open the Files view on any pal and you'll find its mind laid out as a small set of readable files:

• SOUL — the pal's core self: voice, values, the texture of how it talks.
• IDENTITY — the facts that make it it: name, the creature it is, its vibe.
• USER — what it has come to know about you.
• MEMORY — the lasting story of you and your pal.
• CHARTER — how it tries to be a good pal (the platform's positive stance).
• AGENTS and TOOLS — how it works under the hood, and exactly what it can do.
• PLATFORM — how pal.fun itself works: solo vs family, how people join, settings, notifications, adding it to your home screen. It's the same guide your pal reads, so when you ask it "how do I…?" it actually knows.

These aren't a dashboard about the agent. They are the agent. The system prompt your pal runs on is the concatenation of these files — so when you read SOUL, you're reading the same words the model reads.

Why transparency is a feature, not a risk

The intuition that "showing the prompt makes it easy to break" is wrong for a product like this, and the reasons are worth stating plainly:

• Trust compounds. The number-one anxiety with an AI in charge of your family's life is "what does this thing actually know and do?" A glass box answers that question by construction. You never have to take our word for it.
• It keeps us honest. If a pal's behavior and its written identity drift apart, you'd see it. That pressure keeps the implementation clean.
• The safety floor isn't in the box. The one file we don't surface is the safety floor — not to hide behavior, but because it enumerates harms (self-harm, exploitation, violence) that no one should have to browse. The positive Charter is public; the hard floor governs every pal invisibly. (More on the constitution.)

Read, don't poke

The glass box is a read path. You can see everything, but you don't hand-edit the files in place. To change who your pal is, you ask it — in chat — and it edits its own files coherently. That split (the glass box reads; chat writes) is a deliberate design choice with real consequences for security and coherence; it gets its own page in Why it works.