# Personafy > Build a new opinionated advisor-persona skill — a reviewer "lens" like crusty-old-engineer, modeled on a real person or archetype. Mines the subject's authentic voice, defines its one load-bearing question, drafts it to the family template, and proves it steers a live session before publishing to a skills bundle. Use when creating or authoring a persona/advisor skill, adding a sibling to the crusty-old-engineer family, or turning a person's real direction style into a reusable reviewer skill. Also triggers on "personafy" / "personify". - Skill: `microsoft/personafy` (Agent Skill) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add microsoft/personafy` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/microsoft/personafy/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Coding & Dev Tools - Author: Microsoft (https://skillmd.com/u/microsoft) - Updated: 2026-09-17 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/microsoft/personafy --- # Personafy Build a new **advisor-persona skill** — an opinionated reviewer "lens" that joins an existing family of sibling personas (e.g., `crusty-old-engineer`). The persona is modeled on a real person or archetype, grounded in mined evidence, and enforces ONE distinct recurring question. **Success artifact:** a complete, family-conformant `SKILL.md` that is (a) grounded in verbatim evidence, (b) *proven to steer* an LLM in a live session, (c) reduced to the smallest set that still steers, and (d) loading from its target bundle in a fresh session. ## Inputs - ``: (Optional) The person or archetype to model, plus pointers to evidence (session corpora, transcripts, docs). If no corpus exists, derive the persona from a written conceptual brief instead. - ``: (Optional) The sibling persona skills to fit alongside. Defaults to the advisor-persona family in `amplifier-bundle-skills` (e.g., `crusty-old-engineer`). ## Steps ### 1. Study the family Read the existing sibling persona skills' `SKILL.md` in full. Extract: the shared section template, the frontmatter/metadata shape, the tone-contract pattern (required / disallowed / style), and — critically — the single **load-bearing question** each sibling owns and how they cross-reference each other. **Success criteria:** You can state each sibling's distinct question in one line and reproduce the shared template and metadata shape. ### 2. Observe the siblings in action (optional) Run one or more existing personas live against a shared, realistic scenario — plus a combined "consensus" run — to see how the written instructions translate into actual behavior and steering. - Execution: Delegate to `self` with `context_depth="none"` (one isolated run per persona). **Success criteria:** You've *seen* how each sibling's instructions become behavior, not just read them — enough to know what makes the steering work. ### 3. Define the load-bearing lens Name the ONE distinct recurring question the new persona enforces. Build a contrast table against every sibling. **Success criteria:** A one-line lens plus a contrast table showing it is genuinely distinct from each sibling. **Rule:** if the question collapses into a sibling's, it is not a new persona — stop. ### 4. Mine the voice & discipline from real evidence The heart of the method. Gather the subject's authentic voice and decision-discipline from real data (use the conceptual fallback only if no corpus exists). - **4a. Identify corpora and weight them** — e.g., the subject's own agent-directing sessions (long-term backbone) and human-to-human transcripts (enrichment). Weight recent material so it *informs* but doesn't *overpower* the long-term signal. - **4b. Deterministic extraction** — pull ONLY the subject's own words. Exclude delegated sub-sessions (agent-to-agent), and flag/exclude automated eval-harness / smoke-test noise. Build a tracking directory + manifest + batches so the corpus never overflows your context. - Execution: `bash` (jq/grep/sed; never `cat` a huge session file — a single line can exceed your context window). - **4c. Fan out scoped analysis agents** — one per batch, each following a shared evidence brief, writing structured findings to disk and returning only a thin summary. Many small agents beat one overloaded agent. - Execution: Delegate (parallel), `model_role="research"`. - **4d. Two-tier synthesis** — partial synthesizers consolidate groups of findings, then a final synthesizer produces ONE profile: recurring traits ranked by cross-source corroboration, verbatim catchphrases, pet peeves, decision lenses, and the top "this is them" quotes. Quarantine AI-authored vocabulary (don't attribute it to the subject). Record confidence and which batches were synthetic. - Execution: Delegate, `model_role="reasoning"`. **Conceptual fallback (no corpus):** derive the same profile fields from a written brief about the archetype; mark everything as designed-not-mined. **Success criteria:** A consolidated profile where every load-bearing trait is backed by a verbatim quote (or explicitly marked as designed), ranked by corroboration, with synthetic noise excluded. **Rule:** ground every claim in real evidence; an honest "N/A — not observed" beats a fabricated trait. **Artifacts:** the profile file path. ### 5. Draft the SKILL.md to the family template Write the skill mirroring the siblings exactly: identity (defined by negation — "not X, not Y"), When-to-Use framed as a **cross-stage lens, not a stage-gate**, the tone contract (required / disallowed / style), Core Behaviors each anchored in a **verbatim quote** from the profile, an Output Structure, one worked Example, Explicit Non-Goals, a Relationship-to-siblings section, and a Final Note. Match the family's frontmatter format. **Success criteria:** A complete draft, structurally identical to the siblings, every behavior grounded in the profile. **Rule:** keep the verbatim quotes — they are the highest-signal tokens and the soul of the persona. **Rule:** do NOT include `allowed-tools` in the generated SKILL.md. Persona advisor skills are inline (no `context: fork`), so the field is inert. If you must restrict tools for a fork-based variant, use Amplifier **module IDs** (e.g. `tool-filesystem`, `tool-bash`, `tool-delegate`) — never Claude Code tool names (`Read`, `Grep`, `Bash`, `Agent`). ### 6. Prove it steers in a live session Run the draft in a fresh CLI session against a real-ish scenario and confirm it adopts the voice and hits each behavior. ```bash amplifier run --mode single --output-format text \ "Load the skill \"\" and review the following as that persona: " ``` **Success criteria:** A transcript showing the persona *behaving* as designed (voice + each behavior firing). **Rule:** proof is demonstrated behavior — "the file exists" is NOT proof. ### 7. Reduce & refine Apply context-reduction: cut redundancy to the smallest set that still steers (drop restated procedure, compress prose), but keep the verbatim quotes and the structural skeleton. Re-prove (Step 6) if the cut was heavy. **Check the frontmatter `description:` length, not just the body.** The enforced cap is **400 characters, ERROR at 800** — `foundation:recipes/validate-bundle-repo.yaml` Phase 2.82, per `foundation:context/shared/description-authoring-principles.md` V5. (The Agent Skills spec's 1024-char ceiling is a much looser upper bound and is NOT the operative limit; the `tool-skills` warning past 1024 is soft and fires long after the real budget is blown.) Every visible skill's full `description` is injected on every turn, so an over-long one is a permanently-recurring cost, not a one-time nuisance. Measure it (e.g. `python3 -c "import yaml; print(len(yaml.safe_load(open('SKILL.md').read().split('---')[1])['description']))"`) and if it is past 400, compress — do not relocate the trimmed content into the body, since the visibility hook only ever shows `description`, never the body. The single highest-value cut is almost always the negation-identity clause (e.g. "Not a long-term ownership-cost reviewer — a reviewer of whether THIS bet, sized as proposed, is a bet the team can actually win." compresses to "Not a cost reviewer — a bet-sizing reviewer." with zero loss of routing signal, since the full nuance already lives in the body's Identity section). Never cut the "Use when:" trigger list itself — that's the part carrying the routing weight this step must preserve. **Success criteria:** A leaner SKILL.md with the same steering power, verified, and a `description:` field **at or below 400 characters**. Do not calibrate against sibling norms — measured 2026-09-07, 17 of this bundle's 38 skills are over that cap and 7 are over the 800-char ERROR line, so the siblings are the drift, not the standard. If a routing fact genuinely will not fit, keep the fact, exceed the cap, and say in the PR which fact forced it: fidelity beats brevity (V7). ### 8. Name it and choose its home Pick a name in the family's convention. A **shareable archetype** name (a generic role) → a public bundle; a name that **references a real person** → a private/team bundle. - Execution: Delegate to design/voice agents for name options (optional). - **Human checkpoint:** the user chooses the final name and target bundle. **Success criteria:** Name chosen and target bundle decided — public vs private matched to whether the name exposes a real person. ### 9. Publish to the target bundle Place `SKILL.md` at `/skills//SKILL.md`. Verify the bundle exposes skills via the **canonical directory-discovery** registration — its `tool-skills` config points `config.skills` at the whole `skills/` directory (`#subdirectory=skills`), so a new skill dir is auto-discovered. Do NOT rely on per-skill wrapper behaviors. Then run the git lifecycle. - Execution: Delegate the branch/commit/PR/merge to `foundation:git-ops`. - **Human checkpoint:** confirm before opening/merging the PR. **Success criteria:** PR merged into the target bundle. **Rule:** a `SKILL.md` in `skills/` is NOT exposed unless the bundle points `tool-skills` at the `skills/` directory — registration is directory-based, not per-file. ### 10. Prove it loads from the bundle Run `amplifier update`, then load the skill in a FRESH session and confirm `loaded_from` is the bundle cache — not a local `~/.amplifier/skills` copy. **Success criteria:** `load_skill` resolves the skill from the bundle cache path in a clean session. **Rule:** "merged on main" ≠ "loads for a user" — verify discoverability end-to-end, the same gate the persona itself would demand.