Persona documents and reviews

Synced from community-profiles/docs/persona-review.md. The repository is the source of truth.

Each persona is one ordinary Markdown file, useful inside or outside Outfitter. Authoring can compose many inputs, but the canonical artifact committed to the repository is self-contained. Persona-specific information lives in readable Markdown rather than configuration fields.

Outfitter’s Personas doc defines the file format, and its Persona reviews use case walks the author → run → paste-anywhere story. This page covers the catalog’s setup and runtime boundary.

normal project documentation
  personas/platform-lead.md
        |
        +-- added as context --> tools that accept Markdown context
        |
        `-- appended at launch -----------> shared persona-reviewer
                                               |
                                               `--> sourced report

Author portable persona documents

persona-authoring is a catalog-level skill that any normal agent can select. It creates one self-contained Markdown file from user-supplied information. It does not require an .agents directory or create Outfitter agents.

Commit the documents in one of two tiers. A persona that only makes sense inside one project goes beside that project’s other durable context, in docs/personas/. A persona whose reader exists independently of any single repository goes in ~/.agents/personas/, where every working directory can reach it:

docs/personas/            # this project's readers
  platform-lead.md
~/.agents/personas/       # readers who outlive any one repository
  founder-operator.md

Both tiers are ordinary directories of Markdown, not resources Outfitter resolves. The launcher searches them in that order, so a project persona shadows a cross-project one of the same name.

The canonical document requires no frontmatter or persona-specific schema. Its H1, opening introduction, responsibilities, goals, concerns, constraints, decision-making signals, and voice all live in ordinary Markdown. The template uses Markdown comments as authoring prompts; a completed file removes those comments and reads like normal project documentation.

Paste or upload the file unchanged into a web agent (claude.ai project knowledge, a ChatGPT project) or another agentic tool that accepts Markdown project context. For normal project work, tell the tool to treat it as stakeholder context, not as its own identity. The same file can steer product planning, research, or design review. Outfitter is one optional consumer.

Keep the portable document separate from runtime packaging

Plain Markdown persona documents are canonical because they keep durable context independent of any runtime and can live with the project’s other documentation. This follows the .agents-first philosophy: keep agent-facing knowledge harness-neutral, then add runtime adapters. Knowing who the user or stakeholder is can improve ordinary project decisions without modeling that person as an executable agent.

An Outfitter-native representation is a separate, deferred design; the portable persona must never depend on it. See the Status section of the Personas spec.

Use one shared reviewer agent

The catalog ships persona-reviewer, a normal agent whose stable loadout selects persona-review. It has no customer identity of its own. One self-contained persona document is appended at launch and exists only for that session.

The portable launch contract — the direct Outfitter command plus atomic shell capture to a durable report path — lives in skills/persona-review/SKILL.md, which is what synced consumers load. They do not need the repository launcher; it resolves paths safely, including paths with spaces, validates the report destination, and returns the Outfitter process’s exit status. Projects can wrap the portable command in a local bin/persona-review to provide named roles or review types.

The profile pins no model. Select a strong-reasoning model when running it — review quality depends on it.

Responsibility boundary

• persona-authoring creates one portable, committed file per persona.
• persona-reviewer is the shared reviewer agent.
• persona-review owns the isolated Outfitter launch and review/report behavior; its generic launch script is optional.
• Callers choose documents and durable report destinations. Project wrappers may add project-specific concerns such as publication.

Reports stay inside the adopted identity and do not explain this framework; publishing systems own provenance metadata.