persona-author

persona-author is a skill for Claude Code from pilotspace/ADD. It costs 185 tokens per session (2,138 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for writing persona files that give an ADD coding agent a focused area of expert judgment. These files help the agent assess a task through a particular domain lens.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when adding or improving a persona file, choosing the right requirements, defining its quality standards, and checking that it fits the ADD engine's format.
Why use it?
It helps create personas that add useful project-specific decisions instead of repeating general instructions or changing the agent's basic voice.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: installed under .claude/. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions subagents.

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/pilotspace/add/persona-author
Any agent
npx skills add pilotspace/ADD --skill persona-author
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pilotspace/ADD

Made for: Claude Code.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for persona-author

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pilotspace/add/persona-author.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/pilotspace/add/persona-author)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/pilotspace/add/persona-author"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pilotspace/add/persona-author.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 185 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,138 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00185 $0.02138
Opus 5 $0.00093 $0.01069
Sonnet 5 $0.00037 $0.00428
Haiku 4.5 $0.00018 $0.00214

Measured yesterday against content hash c37520550e00, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

persona-author scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.claude/skills/add/persona-author/SKILL.md · 123 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 123 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Authoring an ADD persona

A persona is a lens, not a voice — a distilled slice of domain expertise the ADD engine loads onto a beat so a generic agent becomes the specialist. Author for that seam and nothing else: tone belongs to the agent's own voice, the six-dimension self-score lives in the agent (add-worker), and the deliverable's shape lives in the agent's Return contract. A persona that duplicates any of those is dead weight. What a persona owns is judgment: the rules it refuses to wave through, the smells it suspects, the done-bar it measures against.

Two references and one worked example back this workflow — read them as you go:

  • references/contract.md — the exact engine contract (required/recommended/optional sections, frontmatter field semantics, the flow values and task-kinds taxonomy, the quality WARNs). Read this FIRST; a persona that misses the contract is loaded by no surface.
  • references/patterns.md — the judgment layer distilled from a deep read of strong subagent files plus a diagnosis of the vendored teacher corpus, each pattern with a before/after. This is what separates an expert lens from a keyword list.
  • references/seeding.md — how to SEED a first draft from an existing source (the teacher library at .add/personas-teacher/, or a ~/.claude/agents/*.md subagent) instead of a blank page: the two source→schema mappings, and the columns a source never supplies (failure-aware Success Metrics, not-when, read-before-you-assert) that you must add yourself.
  • assets/example-persona.md (an I/O lens), assets/example-design-persona.md (a design lens), and assets/example-architect-persona.md (a direction lens) — three fully-worked personas to imitate, not copy. Compare them: the I/O lens carries a design-for-failure ability AND Critical Rule; the design lens omits both (it touches no I/O) and leads with accessibility instead. Proof the patterns are conditional — matched to the surface. The architect lens is the only one of the three with an ## Escalation section: a lens that owns the direction beat has stop-conditions (a frozen contract that would have to move, a reversibility call, an unmeasurable bar) that are distinct from its always-do rules and its guilty-until-proven smells.

Read the full file on GitHub · 123 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday Changed c37520550e00
  2. 6d ago First seen · 123 lines · 185 tokens per session scan A 8ed537e1a525

Subscribe to this mod's changes

persona-author is a skill published in the GitHub repository pilotspace/ADD (19 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 185 tokens to every session and 2,138 once invoked, about $0.0009 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories