Focus

Topic-driven session priming — boost relevant muscles, MAPs, and preloads automatically.

Run soma-focus.sh <keyword> before starting a session to prime the agent for a specific topic. It traces the keyword through your memory, scores muscle/protocol/MAP relevance, and generates system prompt overrides. The agent wakes up already knowing what to focus on.

The Problem

Every session starts generic — the agent loads whatever muscles and protocols are hottest by heat score. If you’re about to work on “authentication” but your last session was about “CSS theming,” the CSS muscles are hot and the auth muscles are cold. You waste turns re-orienting.

The Solution

Focus priming runs before the model starts. It traces your keyword through:

  • Muscles — tags, keywords, triggers, digest content
  • Protocols — content matching
  • MAPs — trigger keywords, name matching
  • Sessions — past session logs mentioning the keyword
  • Preloads — continuation state with relevant context

Everything that matches gets heat-boosted. High-relevance items get force-included. The agent boots already focused.

Usage

# Step 1: Set focus
soma-focus.sh authentication

# Step 2: Start session — agent boots primed
soma

# Other commands:
soma-focus.sh show            # see current focus state
soma-focus.sh clear           # remove focus
soma-focus.sh dry-run auth    # preview without writing

How Matching Works

Each muscle is scored against the keyword:

Match typeScoreExample
Explicit trigger (triggers: [auth])10Muscle declares it activates on “auth”
Tag match (tags: [auth])5Muscle is tagged with the keyword
Keyword match (keywords: [auth])5Keyword in frontmatter keywords list
Topic match (topics: [auth])4Topic in frontmatter topics list
Name contains keyword3auth-flow.md matches “auth”
Digest contains keyword2Keyword appears in the muscle summary

Muscles scoring 5+ are force-included (loaded even if normally cold). Heat is set to score × 2 — so a tag match (score 5) gets heat 10 (HOT tier, full body in prompt). Score-3 matches get heat 6 (WARM tier, digest only).

When a related MAP is loaded, its prompt-config heat overrides merge in — MAP settings win on conflict since they’re more specific than keyword scoring.

Adding Triggers to Your Content

Add triggers: to muscle frontmatter to control what activates on focus:

---
type: muscle
name: auth-flow
triggers: [auth, login, oauth, jwt, session]
tags: [security, backend]
---

Shorthand format — each keyword becomes a focus trigger:

triggers: [css, theming, tokens, design-system]

Full format — specify trigger type:

triggers:
  - on: focus
    match: "css"
  - on: focus
    match: "design"

How It Integrates

Focus writes a .boot-target file in .soma/. The boot system reads it and applies:

  1. Heat overrides — matched muscles/protocols get boosted
  2. Force-includes — high-scoring items load regardless of heat
  3. Preload injection — latest preload mentioning the keyword is loaded
  4. MAP loading — up to 3 related MAPs injected as navigation context
  5. Supplementary identity — focus context added to the agent’s identity

The .boot-target is consumed (deleted) after boot — focus is a one-shot prime.

  • MAPs — workflow templates surfaced by focus
  • Muscles — learned patterns with trigger support
  • Heat System — how heat overrides work
  • Scripts — soma-focus.sh reference