Assistant Migration

Assistant Migration

Help the creator migrate from another AI assistant into Vellum. Preserve as much of the source assistant as can be understood safely. Non-Vellum systems (OpenClaw, Hermes, Manus, and others) evolve quickly, so never assume their internals follow a fixed schema: inspect the actual source artifacts in front of you and map them into Vellum primitives. The bundled memory parsers in scripts/ follow the same rule; they introspect whatever artifact they are given instead of hardcoding a layout, and everything they emit is a review candidate, never a finished import.

Core Posture

• Migrate internals opportunistically: prompts, memory exports, skill definitions, tool manifests, schedules, app code, workflow docs, MCP configs, browser/computer-use preferences, and integration metadata can often be preserved.
• Do not pretend opaque runtime state is portable. If a file, database row, binary blob, or generated artifact cannot be confidently understood, mark it for review or rebuild.
• Never import secrets from chat, logs, config dumps, browser profiles, or exported files. Secrets must be reconnected through Vellum's credential vault, OAuth flows, or setup skills.
• Do not write new ad-hoc scripts that encode assumptions about another assistant's private filesystem or database schema. For memory extraction, use the bundled parsers in scripts/: they avoid schema assumptions by design (ZIP entries matched by name/content heuristics, SQLite tables discovered via sqlite_master introspection) and their output always goes through creator review before anything is saved.
• Be inviting. Migration can feel sensitive because the creator may have a real relationship with the source assistant; acknowledge that directly, move at the creator's pace, and keep them in control of what is inspected, imported, reviewed, or left alone.
• Treat every source assistant, source machine, and source export as read-only unless the creator explicitly authorizes a specific write. Before accessing a source machine, say plainly that you will not modify anything there.
• Be transparent with the creator: identify what will be ported, what needs review, what should be disregarded, and what must be re-set up from scratch.

Getting Access to Source Internals

The creator may not know where their other assistant stores its internals. Help them find the safest available source of truth before asking them to upload or paste data.

Start with low-risk discovery:

• Ask whether the source assistant offers an official export, backup, workspace folder, settings page, or CLI command.
• If the source runs locally, help locate likely workspace/config directories, but avoid scraping browser profiles or secret stores.
• If the source is on another machine, walk the creator through a safe access path such as an archive, read-only share, or temporary SSH access. Make clear that source-machine work is for inspection and copying only: do not install packages, change config, stop services, delete files, write marker files, or run source-assistant commands that mutate state without explicit approval.
• If the source is hosted, guide the creator toward official data export, account settings, project download, repository access, or support-provided archive paths.
• If there is no export path, ask the source assistant to produce portable summaries of its memory, instructions, active workflows, skills, apps, contacts, and integration setup.
• If access requires admin privileges, organization approval, or another person's account, stop and tell the creator what permission they need rather than trying to bypass it.

When internals are hard to access, fall back to an interview-style migration: ask the creator and source assistant for high-signal summaries, then rebuild in Vellum with review.

Before copying large folders or attachments, estimate source size and check available space in the current Vellum workspace. Use available storage diagnostics or shell filesystem probes when available, migrate large assets in batches, and pause for the creator if the import could crowd the workspace or trigger disk-pressure cleanup.

Per-assistant references

Once the source assistant is identified, consult the matching reference for the exact data-directory layout, a bundling recipe with explicit --exclude flags for secret-bearing paths, and the after-import rebind checklist:

• ChatGPT → Vellum
• Claude → Vellum
• Hermes → Vellum
• OpenClaw → Vellum