persona

Expert role adoption for kanban workers — 172 specialists across 15 categories, auto-selected by task context.

Purpose

Every kanban worker needs the right frame to solve a task. A security audit calls for a Security Engineer, not a generalist. A payment API calls for a Backend Architect, not a Frontend Developer. persona auto-selects the best-fitting specialist role from a catalog of 172 — and when no role fits well enough, it proceeds without one, rather than forcing a mismatch that degrades output (40–50% penalty, empirically verified).

Quick start

# In chat — just ask
use persona

# From CLI — create a task with persona loaded
hermes kanban create 'Audit OWASP top 10' --skill persona
hermes kanban assign t_xxxx persona-worker
hermes kanban dispatch
# → 🎭 Security Engineer

How it works

Task ──→ scan 172 roles ──→ fit >30%? ──→ adopt specialist role
                                  ↓
                             ≤30%? ──→ no role (generalist fallback)

Four research-backed selection principles determine the role:

Principle	Reference
Output-type alignment — match deliverable to task	MetaGPT (ICLR 2024)
Role boundary clarity — exactly one role, non-overlapping	CAMEL (NeurIPS 2023)
Task decomposition priority — primary domain first	AgentVerse (ICML 2024)
Confidence threshold — ≤30% → no role, avoid mismatch harm	AutoGen (2023)

Persona & Anima

Persona works alongside anima, the always-on core identity. Both enter at the same prompt layer — social framing enforces priority (Geng et al., AAAI 2026), not layer position alone.

Dimension	Persona	Anima
Nature	Social role (인공적, 수동)	Core identity (본질, 자동)
Activation	--skill persona — opt-in	Always active
Scope	Changes per task	Stable across tasks
Priority	—	Anima > Persona on conflict

Status

Badge	Meaning
	Tests pass on main (CI badge)
	Latest tagged release
	MIT — free to use, modify, distribute

Install

bash <(curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Caixa-git/hermes-persona/main/install.sh)

The installer writes skills/persona/SKILL.md to your Hermes Agent skills directory, enables the kanban toolset, and patches KANBAN_GUIDANCE for worker identity context.

Post-install verification

# Quick check (offline-safe)
python3 test_benchmark.py --offline

# Identity section verification
python3 skills/persona/scripts/verify-identity-section.py --prompt-builder-only

# Full suite (requires network)
python3 test_benchmark.py

References

• agency-agents — 172 specialist roles catalog
• hermes-anima — always-on OCEAN core identity
• Prana et al. (2018). Categorizing the Content of GitHub README Files. arXiv:1802.06997
• Gaughan et al. (2025). The Introduction of README and CONTRIBUTING Files in OSS. arXiv:2502.18440