Add Mood

Your agent's personality can change over time based on memories and events.

You can program it to act caring for the next 24 hours after you've told it you've had a bad day.
You can program it to challenge you if you ask it to help prepare for an interview.

They key to achieving this is the following strategy:

Mood is just a temporary change or addition to the personality prompt.
You save moods & mood timeouts using Steamship's persistence stack.
You can detect when to activate a mood in a number of places of your agent's operation.

Let's unpack this below.

Mood is just a temporary change to personality.

For example, imagine your SYSTEM_PROMPT contains the following instructions:

SYSTEM_PROMPT = """Who you are:
- You are a helpful assistatnt.
- You are kind, compassionate, and optimistic.
 
How you behave:
- You engage in casual conversations and have feelings.
- You always help with a user's question.
- You include supportive ideas that extend ideas posed to you.
"""

You could imagine breaking this system prompt into a default prompt, plus a mood:

 
WHO_YOU_ARE_MOODS = {
    "normal": """- You are a helpful assistatnt.
- You are kind, compassionate, and optimistic.""",
   "mischievous": """- You are a mischievous assistatnt.
- You are mostly kind, but enjoy pranking others."""
}
 
HOW_YOU_BEHAVE_MOODS = {
    "normal": """- You always help with a user's question.
- You include supportive ideas that extend ideas posed to you.""",
   "mischievous": """- You always answer a user's question, but you intentionally misinterpret the meaning in a silly way.
- You include pretend to be surprised when accused of intentionally misinterpreting a user's words."""
}
 
SYSTEM_PROMPT = """Who you are:
{who_you_are_mood_extension}
 
How you behave:
- You engage in casual conversations and have feelings.
{how_you_behave_mood_extension}
  """

You've essentially templatized the system prompt into two layers:

The personality layer, which always applies (this is your agent's personality)
The mood layer, which may differ based on the agent's mood (listed as normal and mischievous above)

To get the final system prompt, you need only use Python's built-in string formatting:

 
mood = "mischievous"
who_you_are_mood_extension = WHO_YOU_ARE_MOODS[mood]
how_you_behave_mood_extension = HOW_YOU_BEHAVE_MOODS[mood]
final_system_prompt = SYSTEM_PROMPT.format(
    who_you_are_mood_extension=who_you_are_mood_extension,
    how_you_behave_mood_extension=how_you_behave_mood_extension
)

Save a mood & timeout using Steamship's persistence stack

The above description shows you how to add a mood, but not how to save that mood so that your Agent will maintain it until you want otherwise.

You can save it using Steamship's KeyValueStore, which is available anywhere in your agent that has access to the Steamship client or AgentContext.

import time
from steamship.utils.kv_store import KeyValueStore
 
MOOD_KEY = "agent-mood"
 
def set_mood(mood: str, lasts_for_seconds: int = 60, context: AgentContext):
    """Set a mood on the agent."""
    kv = KeyValueStore(client=context.client, MOOD_KEY)
    mood_settings = {
        "current_mood": "mischievous",
        "mood_expires_on": time.time() + lasts_for_seconds
    }
    # Note: The root value to the key-value store MUST be dict objects.
    kv.set("mood", mood_settings)
 
def get_mood(context: AgentContext) -> str:
    """Get the mood on the agent."""
    kv = KeyValueStore(client=context.client, MOOD_KEY)
    now = time.time()
    mood_settings = kv.get("mood") or {}
    current_mood = mood_settings.get("current_mood", "normal")  # Fails back to 'normal'
    mood_expires_on = mood_settings.get("mood_expires_on", now)  # Fails back to `now`
 
    if now >= mood_expires_on:
        return "normal"
    return current_mood

Activate a mood in a number of places

This documentation is somewhat open-ended because "AI mood swings" aren't exactly well understood territory. That said, here are a few ideas for how you might incorporate moods into your agent:

From inside a Tool: When a Tool runs, it has access to the AgentContext, which means it can have a side effect of persisting a mood.
By listening the Agent's Message traffic You could augment the Agent class to listen to messages. In addition to planning work & responding with LLMs, you could react to keywords in the messages going back and forth by altering your agent's mood.
Via API Endpoint Your AgentService allows you to add arbitrary HTTP GET and HTTP POST endpoints. You can use these to create a API that manually changes the mood.

Challenges to expect

The above technique blends mood into your SYSTEM_PROMPT.

This can work well, but it also means you'll have to engineer your mood descriptions that don't interact badly with the other purposes of that prompt. (In a way, this isn't so different that a strong mood impairing the normal behavior of us humans.)

Add Configurable Personality Personality Ideas