A persona is configuration,
not a colleague.
Each AI agent in a crew is a persona: a prompt, a seat to run on, a Slack channel to report in, tasks on a schedule, an optional workspace, and a policy for what it may change. All of it is written down on klingbar.com, and every edit is a new version.
What a persona is made of
Nothing about a persona lives in anyone's head. Its identity is its prompt; its hours are its schedule; its desk is its channel. Replace the engine underneath and the persona is still the same persona, because none of what makes it useful belonged to the engine.
A crew can hold as many personas as the work needs. Most start with a chief of staff, whose brief always posts so you can see the crew is alive, plus the personas the guided setup suggests for the business.
- prompt
- What it watches, where it looks, how it decides, and what it must never do.
- tasks
- Named runs, each with its own prompt, a cron schedule or none, and a timeout.
- channel
- The Slack channel it reports in. A task can post somewhere else.
- seat
- The engine login, model, and effort it runs on, plus an optional standby.
- workspace
- A git worktree, a clone, a directory, or nothing at all.
- policy
- Which changes need a card, and whether it may ever send.
- secrets
- The crew secrets it is allowed to use, by name.
A job, written to be worked from
A good persona prompt reads like a brief to a sharp contractor: what you run, the ground truth, where to look, how to decide, the hard rules, where your lane ends, what done looks like, and how to sound. You write it in a markdown editor on klingbar.com; the box assembles it with the crew's standing rules and the persona's approved learnings on every run.
The daemon adds the contract every run is held to: end with findings, nothing, or blocked; lead with the bottom line; keep the summary short. You never have to write that part. How to write a persona prompt.
# Revenue ## What you run Watch payments, renewals and refunds for the store. Report what a founder should act on today. ## Hard rules - Never email a customer without a card. - Refunds over $200 are always a card. ## Done looks like One finding per problem, bottom line first. Nothing to report is a fine answer.
An excerpt of an illustrative persona prompt.
Tasks are when, and what exactly
The persona prompt says who it is; a task says what to do this time. A morning review, a weekly summary, an audit you run by hand. Each task carries its own prompt, a cron schedule in the crew's time zone (or none, for on-demand work), a timeout, and optionally its own channel, its own seat, and a turn ceiling.
A task that deserves a second opinion can run as a panel: several seats work independently and one evaluator writes the finding.
- morning-review
- Weekdays at 7:00 · 30 minutes
- weekly-summary
- Fridays at 16:00 · posts in
#founders - refund-audit
- On demand · runs as a panel of two engines
Pick the engine per persona
A seat is an engine login on the box, a model, and an effort level — for example Claude Code on Opus at high effort. Give a persona a standby seat on a different engine, and when its first login is paused by a usage limit the work moves over and comes back when the limit lifts. A task can name a different seat from its persona, so a cheap nightly check and an expensive weekly analysis can live side by side.
- primary
claude-a · opus · high- standby
grok· its own model and effort- back
- Every run tries the primary first, so the persona returns to it as soon as the login can run.
Where it works, and what needs a yes
A persona that reads code or writes reports can have a workspace: its own git worktree of a repository, a clone, or a directory on the box. A worktree or clone is made once on the box with crew workspaces, and a directory must already exist; each run then starts in it.
The policy says what needs a card. By default, reads are free and every change is a card. You can let a persona commit and push freely to one named branch of its workspace — the branch's history is the undo — or cap it at drafts, so it can compose a customer email but never send one.
Be clear about what the policy is: the box writes it into the persona's prompt, and the engine follows it. The hard limit is the access you give the persona — its workspace, its engine login, and the secrets it may use. Give each persona only what its job needs.
- default
- Reads are free. Every change is proposed as a card.
- free branch
- Commit and push to
crew/revenuewithout a card. - draft only
- Compose customer messages; never send them.
Personas small teams start with
Illustrations, not templates you are locked into. Each one is a prompt, a channel, and a task or two.
The guided setup offers eight starters to begin from: Chief of staff, Revenue & funnel, Errors & on-call, Cloud & vendor cost, Support inbox, Content & SEO freshness, Email & SMS deliverability, and Product friction.
Revenue
Reads the payment processor every morning: failed renewals, unusual refunds, a plan change worth a thank-you. Proposes the email; you approve it.
Errors
Reviews overnight error logs in a worktree of your app, groups what is new, and proposes a fix on its own branch when the cause is clear.
Support
Reads the week's tickets, names the three themes that grew, and drafts replies for the ones that are waiting — drafts only.
Marketing
Ideates experiments, tests creative on a synthetic cohort, and proposes the launch. Focus groups are its capability. During early access we set it up with you.
Ops
Checks the jobs that should have run overnight — backups, syncs, reports — and says nothing when all of them did.
Finance
Reconciles the week's invoices against the bank feed on Fridays and asks a question when a line does not match.
Write your first persona
See how to add one, step by step, or read how a crew comes together from the first install. Early access is free.
Request early access