openclaw/docs/concepts/user-model.md

summary, title, read_when

summary	title	read_when
Manage durable user preferences and your Gateway profile identity	User model	You want stable preferences to guide future sessions You need to update a preference without leaving contradictory history You are deciding whether something belongs in USER.md or MEMORY.md You want to link GitHub credit to your Gateway profile

USER.md is the optional user-model artifact in an agent workspace. It stores stable preferences, communication style, relationships, and active-project context as directives that can guide future sessions.

OpenClaw loads USER.md beside MEMORY.md at session start. It has a separate small bootstrap budget, and edits are picked up on later turns in a long-lived session. If the file is absent, startup continues without it.

Gateway profile and GitHub credit

Your authenticated Gateway profile is separate from USER.md. Open Settings → Profile → Identity to set the display name and avatar shown to other people on the Gateway. A custom OpenClaw avatar remains authoritative even when you link GitHub.

Enter a GitHub username in the GitHub row to opt into public commit attribution. The Gateway resolves the public account through GitHub, stores its stable numeric account id and current login, and derives a GitHub noreply address. OpenClaw never requests or stores a private GitHub email for this feature.

When your authenticated profile has prompted a session before an agent run, commits created from that run receive your exact Co-authored-by trailer. All linked profile-backed human participants are eligible; channel-only identities, agents, bots, and the configured primary Git author are excluded. The participant set is bounded to 32 and recorded best-effort. The run tells the model when an eligible profile is unlinked or the bound may be incomplete; it never guesses an identity from transcript names.

OpenClaw supplies exact trailers in the model context for that turn and instructs coding agents to retain them through amendments, rebases, and squash commits so credit reaches the final commit merged to the default branch. The trailers are not exported through the process or shell environment. Git commands remain ordinary shell execution: OpenClaw does not replace git or install repository hooks, so the instruction and post-commit verification are the enforcement boundary.

Changing the linked username resolves and stores the new public account. Disconnect stops attribution for future runs; it does not rewrite commits that already contain the public trailer.

Write directives, not observations

Each entry has a metadata line followed by one imperative directive:

<!-- observed: 2026-07-27 | status: active -->

- Prefer concise progress updates during implementation work.

Use these rules:

• Begin with an imperative such as Always, Never, or Prefer.
• Record the date the preference was observed.
• Use only active or superseded for status.
• Keep one behavioral instruction per directive.
• Store only details that improve assistance. Do not turn the file into a dossier.

PrefEval found that preference following degrades sharply in longer conversations, even with retrieval and prompting (arXiv:2502.09597). Restating a stable preference as a directive makes the expected behavior explicit at the point where the agent uses it.

Supersede in place

When a preference changes, update its existing section. Do not append a second active directive elsewhere in the file.

Before:

<!-- observed: 2026-05-10 | status: active -->

- Prefer detailed explanations for every code change.

After:

<!-- observed: 2026-05-10 | status: superseded -->

- Prefer detailed explanations for every code change.

<!-- observed: 2026-07-27 | status: active -->

- Prefer concise implementation summaries unless more detail is requested.

Keep the superseded entry next to its replacement so the current directive is unambiguous. HorizonBench reports that systems often select an originally stated preference after the user has changed it (arXiv:2604.17283); append-only contradictory history recreates that failure mode.

Choose the right file

Information	Store it in
Stable preference or communication style	USER.md
Relationship or active-project fact that changes how the user should be assisted	USER.md
Durable non-profile fact, decision, or lesson	MEMORY.md
Detailed observation or running context	memory/YYYY-MM-DD.md
Event-conditioned future action	Standing intents
Exact-time or recurring action	Scheduled task

Keep it compact

USER.md has a deliberately smaller bootstrap budget than general workspace files. When it becomes crowded, remove stale superseded entries and move project detail that does not alter behavior into daily memory or MEMORY.md.

Related

• Memory overview
• Standing intents
• Agent workspace