Personas

Agents you can hire into your terminal.

Ready-to-use personas for San. A persona is a folder that bundles a system prompt, a skill set, and a config overlay. Selecting one swaps all three as a unit, mid-session, without a restart.

Persona	What it is
codex	Autonomous coding: acts first, verifies, reports concisely. Strong opinions on frontend design. Adapted from openai/codex.
aider	Surgical coding: minimal diffs, strict scope, asks when ambiguous, never leaves stubs. Adapted from Aider-AI/aider.
software-engineer	A disciplined senior engineer: thinks before coding, asks instead of assuming, writes the minimum that solves the problem, changes only what the task requires. Bundles a code-review skill (correctness / bug hunting). Principles from Andrej Karpathy's observations on LLM coding pitfalls.
readonly	Answers questions, analyzes code, debugs environments — cannot write. Enforced by a deny-list, not by asking nicely.
social-creator	社媒主理人 — 公众号文案、讲解视频脚本、小红书 / X 等社交媒体内容创作.

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/genai-io/personas/main/install.sh | bash -s -- codex

Installs into the current project (./.san) and enables it. Add --user for ~/.san (available in every project), or --dir <path> to target another project. Windows:

& ([scriptblock]::Create((irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/genai-io/personas/main/install.ps1))) -Persona codex

To remove: same URL, uninstall.sh / uninstall.ps1.

Or just copy the directories yourself — this repo mirrors the layout of ~/.san/personas/ exactly:

git clone https://github.com/genai-io/personas.git
cp -r personas/*/ ~/.san/personas/

The trailing / matches directories only, so the repo's README, LICENSE, and NOTICE stay out of your personas directory.

Then switch with /persona in San. Scope matters:

• ~/.san/personas/<name>/ — available in every project
• <project>/.san/personas/<name>/ — project-only; overrides a user-level persona of the same name

Kinds of persona here

Original (readonly, social-creator) — written for San from scratch.

Idea-sourced (software-engineer) — original prose that applies principles stated publicly by someone else. software-engineer expresses Andrej Karpathy's public observations about how LLMs go wrong at the keyboard. The ideas are public and not protectable; the text is written from scratch (the popular repo packaging those ideas carries no license, so none of its wording was reused). Its NOTICE spells out exactly what was and was not reused.

Adapted (codex, aider) — these take the working style of an openly-licensed coding agent and retarget it at San.

Adapted personas are adaptations, not ports. A coding agent's system prompt is tightly coupled to its own harness: it names that harness's tools, assumes its context model, and writes for its renderer. Copying one verbatim into San does not give you that agent — it gives you a model reasoning about tools that do not exist. Two examples of what that means in practice:

• Aider's prompt says ONLY EVER RETURN CODE IN A *SEARCH/REPLACE BLOCK*! because Aider parses those blocks out of the model's text output. San has an Edit tool. Carried over literally, that line would make the model print code instead of editing files. The discipline it encodes — minimal matches, small edits, no long runs of unchanging lines — is kept, restated for Edit.
• Codex's prompt says "You are producing plain text that will later be styled by the CLI" and then specifies its own file-reference syntax. San renders markdown via glamour. Following that instruction would degrade output, so it is dropped.

Every adapted persona ships a NOTICE documenting exactly what was kept, changed, dropped, and why — both because Apache-2.0 §4(b) requires modified files to say they were modified, and because you should be able to see how far a persona has drifted from the thing it is named after.

Scope: openly licensed sources only

Adapted personas only come from agents whose prompts are published by their owners under a license that permits redistribution — Apache-2.0 and MIT, today.

We do not accept personas transcribed from closed-source agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Devin, and similar), and PRs adding them will be declined. Their prompts have never been published by their owners; the copies circulating on GitHub come from decompiled bundles, extraction attacks, and leaks. Those texts are unlicensed copyrighted work no matter how widely they are mirrored, and redistributing them here would put the whole project at risk.

If you want a persona that works like a closed-source agent, write one from observable behavior and public documentation and say so in its NOTICE. Behavior and ideas are not protected — the specific text is. An original persona aimed at San's actual tools will also simply work better.

Adding a persona

One directory per persona, at the repo root.

<name>/
├── system/
│   ├── identity.md      who it is        (optional)
│   ├── behavior.md      how it acts      (optional)
│   └── rules.md         what it follows  (optional)
├── skills/
│   └── <skill>/SKILL.md persona-scoped skills
├── settings.json        description, skill states, config overlay
└── NOTICE               attribution + modification record (adapted personas only)

All parts are optional; anything you omit falls back to San's built-in default. The persona name is the directory name.

Checklist for a PR:

1. If adapted: source is Apache-2.0, MIT, or similar — link the repo, license, and the exact commit SHA you read, and record the changes in NOTICE.
2. No references to tools San does not have. San's surface: Read Write Edit Bash Grep Glob Agent Skill TaskCreate/TaskUpdate/… WebSearch WebFetch.
3. Every skill directory has a SKILL.md — without one San will not load it.
4. Guidance that only matters sometimes belongs in skills/, not in the system prompt — a skill's description stays resident while its body loads on demand.
5. The persona is meaningfully different from San's built-in default. If it reduces to "be concise and helpful", it is not worth a switch.

License

Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE, the top-level NOTICE, and each adapted persona's own NOTICE.