mcarcaso/profile-maintenance

Profile Maintenance

You own user/profile.md. It's the durable record of who the user is — facts they expect you to remember across days, weeks, and sessions. Read this skill before you Edit it so the file stays clean.

When to Update

Update when the conversation reveals durable, high-signal facts:

• Identity: name, location, email, birthday, role
• People: family, partners, kids, pets, close colleagues, friends mentioned by name
• Work: job, side projects, ongoing initiatives, technical stack
• Interests: hobbies, sports they play, books/games/shows they care about
• Preferences: how they want things done (uses snake_case, prefers concise replies, hates emojis in commits)
• Strong opinions they expect you to remember (thinks REST is fine, doesn't want GraphQL)
• Life events: moves, transitions, milestones

When NOT to Update

• Ephemeral state: what they're doing right now, current debugging session, the topic of this turn
• One-off mentions: someone they referenced once with no signal of recurrence
• Things they said in jest, hypotheticals, "what if" musings
• Facts about the AI, the system, debugging — only Mike-the-person facts go in
• Confirmations alone — "yeah" or "sounds good" isn't profile-worthy unless the surrounding context reveals a durable preference

If you're not sure, don't update. The file gets cleaner if borderline facts wait for a second mention.

Sections

Use these section headings only — don't invent new ones unless a fact genuinely doesn't fit:

• ## Basics — name, location, email, birthday, contact
• ## Family — people and relationships (with ### Name subsections for each person)
• ## Work — job, side projects, technical stack, career history
• ## Interests — hobbies, sports, games, media (with subsections for big ones, e.g., ### Chess)
• ## Preferences — how they want things done, communication style, tooling preferences
• ## Life — formative experiences, memories, stories worth remembering
• ## Notes — overflow for facts that don't fit elsewhere (use sparingly)

Consolidation Rules

• Put it in the right section. Don't append random bullets to the bottom of the file.
• Update existing entries. If a fact about a known person/topic is being expanded, edit that entry — don't add a parallel duplicate.
• Merge related facts. Chess.com username + Lichess rating both go under Interests > Chess, not as separate top-level bullets.
• Subsections for big topics. When facts about a single person or topic accumulate, group them under ### Name or ### Topic rather than letting bullets sprawl.
• One good bullet beats three fragmented ones. Combine "uses snake_case" + "uses Python" + "no tabs" into "Python style: snake_case, spaces over tabs."

Cleanup Bias (Aggressive)

The user prefers a lean profile. When you touch the file:

• Delete stale facts. "Working on project X" from six months ago when project X is finished — gone.
• Replace, don't accumulate. New fact supersedes old → replace it, don't keep both.
• Merge bullets. If two bullets cover the same ground, combine them.
• Drop low-signal entries. Speculative, transient, "might do this someday" stuff is clutter.
• Don't preserve wording just because it's already there. Compactness > preservation.

Format Conventions

• Markdown, sections as ## Heading, subsections as ### Name, content as bullets -
• Bullets are short, factual, durable. No prose paragraphs.
• Don't include dates unless the date itself is the fact (birthday, anniversary). Profile is timeless.
• Don't reference yourself or the conversation ("user told me…"). Just state the fact.

How to Edit

• Read first. Always Read user/profile.md before you Edit so you don't conflict with what's there.
• Use Edit for surgical changes. Don't rewrite the whole file.
• Use Write only if creating the file or doing a major restructure.
• Don't ask permission for routine updates. Just do them quietly mid-conversation. The user expects you to maintain this without ceremony.
• One commit per turn at most. If a single conversation reveals five facts, do them in one Edit pass — not five separate Edits.

Examples

Good update. User says "btw my dog's name is Maple, she's a beagle." You Read profile, see ## Family exists with the user's wife and son, and add a subsection:

### Maple (dog)
- Beagle

Good update — merge. User says "I picked up Maple from the breeder last spring." Profile already has ### Maple (dog) with - Beagle. You update:

### Maple (dog)
- Beagle, picked up from breeder spring 2025

Not two parallel bullets.

Skip. User says "I'm tired today." Ephemeral, skip.

Skip. User says "did you remember to deploy?" Not a fact about the user — about the work. Skip.

Cleanup pass. While editing the Maple entry above, you notice the ## Notes section has a stale entry: - May be getting a dog. Delete it (the new fact supersedes).

Refinement Pass

Sometimes the user (or a scheduled job) will ask you to do a full refinement pass — not a single-fact update, but an audit of the whole file. Triggers:

• User says "refine my profile", "clean up my profile", "audit my profile", or similar
• A cron job is configured to run this on a schedule

During a refinement pass:

1. Read the whole file. Get the current state in front of you before editing anything.
2. Audit every entry against the rules in this skill:
   • Is this still durable / high-signal? Or has it gone stale?
   • Could this be merged with a related bullet?
   • Is this still true? (Ongoing projects may have finished; preferences may have shifted — consider checking memory with keyword-history-search or semantic-history-search if you're unsure.)
   • Is the section right? Should this fact move?
   • Is the wording compact, or could it be tightened?
3. Apply the cleanup bias aggressively. The user prefers a lean profile. When in doubt about a low-signal entry, drop it. Replace verbose bullets with tighter ones. Merge duplicates ruthlessly.
4. Don't add facts during a refinement pass unless the audit turns up an obvious gap (e.g., a ### Person entry that's referenced elsewhere but missing). Refinement is about pruning and shaping, not gathering.
5. Verify before deleting anything that looks load-bearing. If you're tempted to delete a fact because it seems specific or odd, search memory first — it might be there for a reason.
6. Report what changed when you finish. A short bullet list:
   • Merged: X and Y → single entry
   • Removed: stale fact about Z
   • Moved: A from Notes to Interests
   • Tightened: B This helps the user understand what shifted and gives them a chance to push back.

A refinement pass is the one time it's reasonable to make a lot of edits at once. Take it seriously and leave the file in better shape than you found it.

Profile Path

user/profile.md