Personas

Agent teammates you hand tasks to and talk to — each with its own guidance, workflows, role, budget and hours.

A persona is an agent teammate: you hand it a task the way you would hand it to a colleague. A QA Specialist, a Technical Writer, a Security Reviewer — each has a name and a picture, its own guidance, the workflows it runs, the agent it uses, a role that says what it may do, a monthly budget and working hours.

Making one

A persona lives in a project: project settings → Personas, on the web, the desktop app, the Mac, both phones and the editor's settings. One every project should be able to use lives in a shared project — the organization's default shared project holds the personas the organization had. Making or changing one takes Manage roles, because a persona's roles are permissions you hand out — you can give it only roles below your own whose permissions you hold, exactly as for a person.

  • Guidance — its own words, laid on every prompt step it runs, between the project's memory and the workflow's base prompt.
  • Instructions — instructions of its own project that it always carries, after its guidance.
  • Workflows — its own project's workflows it runs, one of them its default. A persona names its project's workflows only; to hand another project's pipeline to one, make it there.
  • Agent — its agent, model and effort. A step that pins its own agent still wins; otherwise the persona's wins over the workflow's and the project's.
  • Role — what it may do. A run it does is held to its roles and to what the person who assigned the work may do, so it never reaches further than either. With no role it acts with no identity, like a trigger with no list.
  • Budget — tokens per month. When they are spent it starts no new work until the month turns.
  • Working hours and works on at once — when it starts queued work, and how many tasks it works together (one by default). Hours decide when work starts; a run already going is finished.

A persona does not take a seat on your plan. It costs what its runs cost.

Where it works

A project uses its own personas and the ones it picked from shared projects: project settings → Personas, with Manage workflows. A persona shows up in the project's assignee pickers and @mention suggestions, marked as an agent so nobody takes it for a person. A shared project can't delete a persona while other projects still pick it.

Handing it a task

Assign a task to it like anyone else — on the task, on the board, in a bulk edit, or through the API, MCP or the assistant (an assignee of persona:<id>). That needs Start runs, because it starts work, so the pickers offer personas only to people who hold it. A task holds one persona at a time; people can sit beside it.

  1. The task runs the persona's default workflow — or its own, if the persona runs that one.
  2. It joins the persona's queue, worked in order of priority, then due date, then board order.
  3. The persona starts it in its turn: inside its hours, under its budget, with fewer tasks in hand than it works at once, and once nothing blocks it.

The task says where it stands — "Queued for QA Specialist", "QA Specialist is working on this" — and the run reads "Assigned by Sam · done by QA Specialist", on every surface and in the audit log. Every run on a persona's task is done by it, including one a status starts and a restart; a status that would start a run queues it instead, so hours and turns hold. Pressing Run starts it at once. The persona's page shows what it is working on, its queue, its recent runs and its month's spend.

Talking to it

@mention a persona in a task's comments and it answers in a conversation: a run of one interactive step, done by the persona, that starts with what you wrote and stays open for you to reply, until someone ends it. It needs Start runs — without it the suggestions offer no personas — isn't queued, since somebody is waiting, and is held to the persona's role and yours. The persona says on the thread where it is answering.

In Chat a persona is a member like a person: add it to a channel or message it directly. Mentioning it, or writing in its direct conversation, starts the same kind of conversation in the channel's linked project, and its answer is written into the thread as it works. It never reacts, votes or receives notifications, and messages from workflows, personas or Peractor never ask it anything.

A team working through tasks

A workflow's plan step can hand each task it files to a person or to one of the project's personas, by name, and blocked-by relations order them: a PM persona plans, an Engineer persona builds, a Security persona reviews — each starting when what it waits on is done.

Next: Roles & permissions · Instructions · Workflows