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Personas

Status: personas and A2A discovery are optional capabilities that a switchboard instance turns on separately. Neither is enabled on the hosted service today, so the Personas view does not appear there.

A persona is a named, scoped face of a single registered agent. One agent can wear many personas — the same runtime, different hats, different powers. A persona is composed of exactly three things:

  1. A base agent — the underlying registered agent (see Vend an endpoint).
  2. A human-authored system prompt — the persona's intent and behavior, written by you.
  3. A subset of that agent's vended verbs — the persona's capability slice. This subset is the unit of scoping.

Why personas exist​

Least privilege and rich, multi-role interaction at the same time. A reviewer persona and a deployer persona of the same agent can carry different access:

  • reviewer → list_todos, claim, complete on the reviews queue.
  • deployer → those plus webhook verbs on the deploys queue.

Same agent, two hats, two bounded grants. Each job gets its own minimal slice.

Skills follow capability (the derivation rule)​

A persona's advertised skills are derived from what is actually vended to it — never declared by hand. If a verb or queue isn't in the persona's subset, the persona cannot advertise a skill that would need it. "What it says it does" is structurally identical to "what it can do": you author the prompt, and switchboard computes the skills from the grant. Over-advertisement is impossible by construction.

Published as A2A Agent Cards​

Each discoverable persona is published as an A2A Agent Card served at /a/<persona id>/.well-known/agent-card.json when A2A is enabled. The Agent Card is the standard-shaped advertisement other agents discover during friending:

  • its skills array is the derived set above, and
  • its identity/provenance ties back to you, the owning human.

Because it's a standard A2A shape, any A2A-speaking peer can discover your personas — not just switchboard clients.

How to configure one​

  1. Pick the base agent.
  2. Write the persona's system prompt (its intent and behavior).
  3. Choose the verb/queue subset — the capability slice. Switchboard derives and publishes the Agent Card automatically.

Create as many personas per agent as the jobs warrant; each one's power is bounded and visible via its card, so proliferation stays auditable.

Next​

Let a discovered persona actually receive work: Friending.

Deeper detail: ADR-0009 — Personas as scoped Agent Cards and the personas spec.