Agent Persona Profile
Treat agent identity as a structured profile object — persona, primary motivator, allowed actions, knowledge bindings — rather than a free-form role sentence in the system prompt.
Problem
Free-form persona prompts collapse into a few failure shapes. Versioning is by git diff over prose, which is brittle. Two variants that should share a base persona accidentally diverge as engineers edit each in isolation. Knowledge bindings (which RAG corpus, which tools, which memory partition) live half in code, half in prose, with no single review surface. Swapping personas at runtime requires re-injecting the whole prompt rather than swapping a typed reference.
Solution
Define a Profile schema with fields: persona (role description), primary motivator (what drives this agent), action set (allowed tools), knowledge bindings (RAG sources, memory partitions, vector stores), behaviour parameters (tone, verbosity, model choice). Store profiles as configuration files. The runtime composes the active system prompt from the profile; runtime swap is by profile id. Inheritance: a base profile defines defaults; specialised profiles override fields. Distinct from [[role-prompting]] (one prose sentence) and from [[personality-variant-overlay]] (multiple voices over a single base).
When to use
- Multiple persona variants share a runtime but differ in role, tools, or knowledge.
- Personas need to be versioned and inherited rather than copy-pasted.
- Runtime persona swap is a product requirement.
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