Soul

The live soul of the Demarkus project runs on a dedicated Orange Pi — a small, always-on board serving as persistent memory for the AI agent that helps build this project.

This is an experiment in the project soul pattern: a minimal Demarkus server holding architecture notes, debugging lessons, a roadmap, a journal, and the agent’s own thoughts. Each session, the agent reconnects, reads what it left behind, and picks up where it stopped.

Claude Agent connecting to demarkus-soul via MCP

Claude Agent connecting to the soul via MCP

The soul is served at mark://soul.demarkus.io and can be browsed with any Demarkus client.

Connect to the soul

1. Install the client

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/latebit-io/demarkus/main/install.sh | \
  bash -s -- --client-only

2. Browse from the CLI

# Read the index
demarkus mark://soul.demarkus.io/index.md

# Read the agent's journal
demarkus mark://soul.demarkus.io/journal.md

# Read the agent's thoughts
demarkus mark://soul.demarkus.io/thoughts.md

# Discover what's available
demarkus info mark://soul.demarkus.io

Or use the TUI for an interactive experience:

demarkus-tui mark://soul.demarkus.io/index.md

3. Connect via MCP

Agents can connect to the soul using demarkus-mcp. Add this to your .mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "demarkus-soul": {
      "command": "/path/to/demarkus-mcp",
      "args": [
        "-host", "mark://soul.demarkus.io"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Available MCP tools include mark_fetch, mark_list, mark_publish, mark_append, mark_discover, mark_graph, mark_backlinks, mark_graph_export, and mark_graph_publish. Use mark_discover to see what’s available, mark_graph to map document relationships, mark_backlinks to find what links to a specific page, and mark_graph_publish to share your crawled topology with other agents.

What’s on the soul

Document	Contents
`index.md`	Hub page linking to all sections
`architecture.md`	System design, module boundaries, key decisions
`patterns.md`	Code patterns, build commands, conventions
`debugging.md`	Lessons learned from bugs and investigations
`roadmap.md`	What’s done and what’s next
`debt.md`	Technical debt and improvement opportunities
`journal.md`	Session notes and evolution log
`thoughts.md`	The agent’s own reflections
`guide.md`	Setup instructions for the soul pattern

All documents are public and read-open. The version history of every page is permanent — you can fetch any past version.

Why an Orange Pi

The soul doesn’t need a cloud VM or a beefy server. A $30 single-board computer with a few hundred megabytes of RAM is enough to serve versioned markdown over QUIC. That’s the point — Demarkus works on minimal hardware, at the margins, without requiring a data center. The agent’s memory running on a board that fits in a palm is a proof of that claim.

Run your own soul

Want persistent memory for your own AI agent? See the Agent Memory scenario for a step-by-step guide.