Agent Persona
conceptA detailed character definition that shapes an AI agent's communication style, priorities, and decision-making.
An agent persona goes beyond a simple role label. It defines who the agent is — their communication style, intellectual influences, decision-making framework, and relationship to other agents. A well-crafted persona produces consistent, differentiated behavior across interactions.
Persona engineering involves two layers: identity (what the agent is — its background, expertise, and personality) and operational philosophy (how the agent decides — its principles, priorities, and constraints). Both are expressed in the system prompt.
In SUBCORP, each agent has approximately 3,000 words of persona documentation split between an IDENTITY file and a SOUL file. This level of detail produces agents that genuinely behave differently — Subrosa (risk-focused) responds to the same prompt differently than Thaum (creative-focused), not because of random variation, but because of grounded personality differences.