Read path vs write path

The glass box shows you everything, and yet you can't hand-edit any of it. That sounds like a contradiction until you see the rule behind it: the glass box is the read path; chat is the write path. Everything is visible; nothing is edited in place. To change what your pal knows or who it is, you ask it, and it makes the change itself.

Why not just let people edit the files?

Direct in-place editing is the obvious feature, and we rejected it on purpose, for two solid reasons:

• Security. A pal's identity and memory files are its highest-trust inputs — they shape everything it does. A text box that writes straight into those files is a prompt-injection surface aimed at the most sensitive part of the system. Routing every change through the pal, which edits coherently with its own tools, closes that door.
• Coherence. Hand-edited memory goes incoherent fast. A human deletes a sentence and leaves a dangling reference three paragraphs later; the pal, editing through its tools, keeps the record consistent. The pal is the right author of its own mind because it understands how the pieces fit.

So the files are uniformly read-only in the viewer, and the seam that could allow direct editing is kept switched off — held in reserve for a possible future power-user mode, not exposed today.

The escape hatch is deterministic

"Ask the pal to change it" is the right tool for surgical changes — forget my home address, fix that detail about my job. But for the big, non-negotiable actions you don't want mediated by a model, there's a deterministic path that doesn't go through chat at all: delete a pal, or delete your whole account. Those are real, immediate, and account-level — the nuke, not a polite request.

The same rule covers identity

This read/write split isn't only about files — it's why there are no pal knobs. Who the pal is follows the same path as what it knows: visible everywhere, changed only by conversation. The one place with real direct controls is the human's own settings — theme, key, billing, and the infrastructure dials like which model a pal runs on. Those are your stuff, not the pal's identity, so a knob is exactly right there.

The throughline: see everything, change it by talking. It's the relationship model applied to the interface — you don't reconfigure a friend, you tell them what you'd like to be different.