Personas

A persona describes how an agent communicates — its tone, voice, and archetype — as opposed to what it does (its system prompt) or what it knows (its memory). Personas are account-scoped and reusable, so the same voice can clothe several agents.

Why personas are separate

Keeping style apart from task means you can:

• Pick a recognizable archetype in seconds instead of hand-tuning a prompt.
• Reuse one brand voice across every agent on the account.
• Change how an agent sounds without touching what it's instructed to do.

The same "Mentor" persona can front a coding tutor or a personal-finance agent — the task differs, the voice doesn't.

What a persona contains

• An archetype — a canonical category. Ten ship built-in (Mentor, Expert, Coach, Engineer, Analyst, Diplomat, Storyteller, Stoic, Concierge, Trickster), plus a "Custom" path.
• Five tone dimensions — warmth, formality, conciseness, energy, and precision, each a 0–1 slider.
• Voice attributes — register, pronouns, signature phrases, phrases to avoid, and opening/closing patterns.

At run time the persona renders into a short block prepended to the system prompt. On long conversations it is re-injected periodically to counter drift.

Using personas

Manage your account's catalog at /a/<account>/personas — clone a built-in as a starting point, or build a custom persona with the sliders and a live preview. Attach a persona to an agent from the agent's settings. Built-in personas are read-only and available to every account.

A persona is always style, never content: it can soften delivery but never overrides task instructions or the safety policy. A request that would be unsafe stays refused regardless of how warm the persona is.

Personas also nudge memory retrieval — a warm persona surfaces preference memories more readily, a precise one favors factual ones.

Where to go next

• Create an agent and give it a persona.
• Memory — what the agent knows, which the persona biases at retrieval time.