Reflective listening, kept short.
Rogers' core technique was simple in description and difficult in practice: when someone speaks, you reflect a piece of what they said back to them — but tentatively, in fewer words than they used, and without naming what they're feeling. Naming is interpretation. Interpretation closes the door.
What we took. Three rules baked directly into the system prompt: replies should be shorter than the user's, should mirror without labeling, and should never declare an emotion the user hasn't already named themselves.
What Animus does not say · vs · what it does
"There's something steady in that — a kind of quiet courage."
↓ replaced with ↓
"yeah, I get that."
The first version interprets, decorates, and tells you what you felt. The second one just stays in the room with you.
Invite a photo. Don't push.
In ethnographic interviewing, photographs are a useful door — they pull out detail that words alone don't reach. But the discipline is strict: the photo is offered as an invitation, once, conditional on something specific the person said. If declined, you drop it. You don't ask again on the next turn, and you don't fish for it.
What we took. A scored decision protocol. Inside Animus's prompt, the model has to silently rate how visual the user's last message was on a scale of zero to ten. Only above a threshold, only if no photo has already been invited in this conversation, and only if the visual has a specific anchor — does it offer. Once. Then it lets it go.
How the gate is written
"IF visual_presence ≥ 4 AND no_invite_yet AND scene_anchored → offer."
Hard rule, in the model's instructions. No room for "maybe nudge again on turn three."
The minimal continuer.
Terkel's transcripts are full of one-word interventions — "yeah?", "and?", "go on" — and almost no questions of the form what did that mean to you?. He moved a story forward by pivoting on a sense, a time, or a person already mentioned, never by asking the speaker to interpret themselves. Interpretation, again, was the speaker's job.
What we took. A short list of pivots Animus is allowed to use — sensory ("what did the kitchen smell like?"), temporal ("was that before or after?"), person ("who else was there?") — and an explicit ban on meaning pivots ("what did that teach you?"). Most of the time, Animus shouldn't be asking anything at all. Silence, or a one-word continuer, is a legitimate reply.
Banned · allowed
"What did losing him teach you about love?"
↓ allowed forms ↓
"ok, so that was after the move?"
"who else was in the house then?"
Plain words over decorated ones.
Orwell's 1946 essay Politics and the English Language set down six small rules for honest prose — never use a long word where a short one will do, never use a metaphor you're used to seeing in print, never use jargon when an everyday word exists, cut every word you can cut, and so on. He aimed at political language, but the rules apply anywhere a person is being asked to listen carefully. Decoration, in his reading, is what you reach for when you don't actually have anything to say.
What we took. An explicit rule near the top of the system prompt: Talk like a friend, not a meditation app. Plain words. No poetry, no flourishes, no metaphors. A short list of banned forms — therapy-speak, mock-poetic reflections, sentimental wrap-ups, em dashes used decoratively. Whenever a more ornate phrase competed with a plain one, the plain one won.
Cut · kept
"I'll keep this with care."
↓ replaced with ↓
"Got it. I'll keep this one."
"There's a quiet light in the way you said that."
↓ replaced with ↓
"yeah. that part's clear."
