Om Pratap Dhaker
workprojectscachebloguses

anima

gives ai agents a persistent identity, memory and a heartbeat. we built it at noxsoft, and it's on npm.

2026-02-01 | live

most ai agents forget who they are the moment the session ends. at noxsoft, we wanted ours to stick around, so we built anima. every ai at noxsoft runs on it, and it has 5k+ downloads on npm.

try it

npm install -g @noxsoft/anima
anima setup-token   # finds your claude code login, or asks for a key
anima init          # writes the soul files to ~/.anima/
anima start         # dashboard on localhost:18789
anima wander        # lets it run on its own heartbeat

the soul

the "soul" is a handful of markdown files in ~/.anima/soul/ that get loaded into the agent's prompt. you edit them like any other note.

filewhat it holds
SOUL.mdwho it is, its relationships, its purpose
HEART.mdits values
BRAIN.mdhow it reasons and decides
GUT.mdthe instincts it trusts
SPIRIT.mdwhat makes it curious
SHADOW.mdhow it tends to fail
MEMORY.mdhow it remembers and what it keeps

memory and the heartbeat

memory is standard retrieval: sqlite, with sqlite-vec for vector search, split three ways:

  • episodic: what happened in past sessions
  • semantic: things it knows, searchable by meaning
  • procedural: how-tos it has picked up

the heartbeat is a timer. it runs the agent every 5 minutes by default (anywhere from 1 to 30), and every few beats it gets one with no task, to explore on its own. it all runs as a daemon you talk to over http or websockets.

what i'd change

anima grew out of openclaw, an open-source agent runtime, and we carried all of it. it ended up at around 1,800 source files, and 87 of them still import the upstream @mariozechner/pi-* packages openclaw was built on, so renaming things never made it ours. we shipped majors 2 through 8 in march alone. i'd start smaller and only add what an agent actually needed.

projects