custom-personas

A guide for creating temporary expert viewpoints when a standard set of brainstorming roles does not fit a specialised topic.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define a role’s voice, contribution, and output format for topics such as tax law, regulatory compliance, hardware reliability, or biotech.
Why use it?
It helps avoid forcing the wrong viewpoint into a discussion or adding several roles that only repeat generic ideas.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the brainstorm-swarm plugin — 4 skills, 1 command, 12 agents shipped together

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/viktorbezdek/skillstack/custom-personas
Any agent
npx skills add viktorbezdek/skillstack --skill custom-personas
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/viktorbezdek/skillstack

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install brainstorm-swarm, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 4 skills, 1 command, 12 agents.

Per session 175 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,708 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 $0.00175 $0.02708
Opus 5 $0.00088 $0.01354
Sonnet 5 $0.00035 $0.00542
Haiku 4.5 $0.00017 $0.00271

Measured 3d ago against content hash e5e3b89d40ba, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

custom-personas 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 3d ago.

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.

brainstorm-swarm/skills/custom-personas/SKILL.md · 283 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 283 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Custom Personas

The canonical 12 cover most decisions. They don't cover every domain. When you need a CFO for a budget brainstorm or a security engineer for threat modeling, design the persona — don't force a canonical to fit.

This skill covers the design discipline for ad-hoc personas: when a custom is justified, how to write the persona prompt, how to invoke it inline (without shipping a new subagent file).

Core principle

A custom persona is a tool, not a feature. Design one when the canonical 12 demonstrably don't cover the domain. Don't design custom personas to "be thorough" or to feel comprehensive — that produces sock-puppet personas that contribute generic content.

When a custom persona is justified

A custom persona is justified when:

  1. The domain has specialized knowledge that the canonical personas don't have (e.g. tax law, regulatory compliance, hardware reliability, biotech)
  2. The decision affects a specific stakeholder group with a distinct perspective (e.g. enterprise procurement, customer success at scale, sales at a specific deal size)
  3. The framing requires expertise the canonical personas wouldn't bring (e.g. economist for pricing strategy, behavioral psychologist for engagement design)
  4. The brainstorm is industry-specific (e.g. healthcare, finance, defense, EdTech)

A custom persona is NOT justified when:

  1. The canonical personas would cover it adequately if you tightened their prompts
  2. You're trying to "represent everyone" — the swarm is illustrative, not exhaustive
  3. You want a "voice" persona (poet, philosopher, etc.) that doesn't carry domain expertise
  4. The custom persona's contribution would substantially overlap with a canonical one

Common custom persona archetypes

Domain Custom persona What they bring
Budget / finance CFO ROI rigor, capital allocation framing, runway implications
Legal / compliance General Counsel regulatory risk, contract implications, IP concerns
Security Security Engineer threat modeling beyond what Operator covers, attack surface
Sales Sales Lead what closes deals, what blocks them, win/loss patterns
Customer Success CS Lead renewal risk, expansion opportunity, support burden
Marketing Head of Marketing positioning, launch strategy, channel implications
Data Data Scientist what's measurable, what data we have, what we can learn
HR / People People Operations culture impact, hiring implications, team dynamics
Industry-specific [Domain] Expert regulatory specifics, industry conventions, domain risks
Stakeholder voice The [specific stakeholder] the actual voice of an affected party (enterprise CTO, hospital admin, school principal)

Read the full file on GitHub · 283 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 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. 3d ago First seen · 283 lines · 175 tokens per session scan A e5e3b89d40ba

Subscribe to this mod's changes

custom-personas is a skill published in the GitHub repository viktorbezdek/skillstack (11 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 175 tokens to every session and 2,708 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.

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