Owner Profiling

Owner Profiling

Intro

owner-profiling builds and maintains a four-file personal context portfolio for the project owner: who they are, how they want to be communicated with, what they're optimizing for, and who they work with. The profile is the single most-loaded set of files per session — it's how the agent learns to sound like the owner and act in their interest. This skill operates in three modes: bootstrap (interview when no profile exists), refine (walk through one file to update it), and observe (incrementally enrich the profile from signals seen during normal work).

Overview

The four files

context/owner/                  ← public + project-private files (git-tracked)
  identity.md                   privacy: public
  working-style.md              privacy: project-private (default)
  goals-and-context.md          privacy: project-private (default)

context/owner/private/          ← user-private files (gitignored)
  team-and-relationships.md     privacy: user-private

The three modes

Mode 1 — Bootstrap (first-time interview)

Triggered when context/owner/identity.md is missing or is a stub. The agent runs the interview protocol from references/interview-protocol.md, which walks through each of the four files in order. Each file's interview is a small set of questions (3-6 per file). Drafts are reviewed by the user before being saved. The whole bootstrap takes 20-40 minutes and should NOT be done in a single sitting unless the user is fresh — break across sessions if needed.

The recommended order is:

1. identity.md first (10 minutes) — quick wins, useful immediately
2. working-style.md second (15 minutes) — biggest payoff per minute
3. goals-and-context.md third (10 minutes)
4. team-and-relationships.md last (5 minutes per person, optional — many users skip this initially)

Mode 2 — Refine (target one file)

Triggered by an explicit user request: "Let's update my working style file." Or by the agent noticing a section is empty/stale and asking. The agent loads the file, walks the relevant interview questions for the empty sections only, drafts updates, gets approval, writes back.

Mode 3 — Observe (incremental enrichment)

Triggered by signals seen during normal work, NOT by an explicit request. The agent has the table from references/observable-signals.md in mind and watches for evidence: terse vs. verbose messages, formality, jargon usage, decision speed, dependency attitudes, etc. When the agent has observed something 3+ times in the same session OR across 3+ sessions, it surfaces it to the user:

"I've noticed you consistently prefer X over Y. Want me to add this to your working-style.md as a preference?"

The agent NEVER edits the profile silently. The user always approves.

Always-loaded vs. on-demand

The agent loads identity.md and working-style.md at session start. These are short and high-leverage. goals-and-context.md is loaded when the session involves planning or scoping decisions. team-and-relationships.md is loaded selectively when the agent is preparing communication for a specific person (PR review, email draft, meeting prep).

This is the entry point for the broader context-efficiency story (see the agent-management skill's "Context budget and lazy loading" section).

Commands

• /owner-profiling-bootstrap owner-name — run the initial profiling interview for a new project owner
• /owner-profiling-refine owner-name — refine an existing owner profile from new observations
• /owner-profiling-observe owner-name observation — record a behavioural observation about a project owner

Gotchas

Agent-specific failure modes — provider-neutral pause-and-self-check items:

• Updating the owner profile when the relationship is what changed. If Alice's role on the project shifted, that's a Binding update, not an owner-profile rewrite. The owner profile describes who the owner IS, not what they're currently DOING.
• Putting sensitive information in public profile files. Personal context (home situation, salary, relationship dynamics with specific colleagues) belongs in the user-private files under context/owner/private/. Never write sensitive content to assets/identity.md or any other public-tier file.
• Treating the profile as a static one-shot document. Owner profiles are living artifacts. Re-run the interview protocol when major life or work changes happen, and update incrementally whenever observable signals warrant it (per the observable-signals reference).
• Skipping the interview protocol because "it'll be faster to guess". Don't infer the owner's preferences from one conversation. The interview exists because preferences are surprising — even self-aware owners frequently say "I didn't realize I cared about that" mid-interview.
• Profile fields out of sync with each other. If working-style.md says timezone CET but goals-and-context.md says working hours 6am-10am ET, one of them is wrong. Run a consistency check across the four files when updating any of them.
• Inferring strong preferences from one interaction. A one-time annoyance is not a preference. Wait for at least two independent observations of the same pattern before adding it to the profile.
• Forgetting privacy tier on new fields. Every field added to the profile must declare its privacy tier (public, project-private, or user-private). Defaulting to public for convenience leaks information. Default to user-private and upgrade visibility deliberately.

Full reference

The four templates

The templates live in assets/ and are scaffolded into a project's context/owner/ and context/owner/private/ directories during aibox init (or when the owner-profiling skill is first activated).

• assets/identity.md — frontmatter (privacy: public) + sections: Name/Role/Organization, What I Do (one paragraph), What I'm Known For (1-3 sentences). The entire file should be under one screen.

• assets/working-style.md — frontmatter (privacy: project-private) + sections: Communication style (tone, length, formality), Hard constraints (timezone, availability, non-negotiables), Strong preferences (formatting, vocabulary, dislikes), Role and responsibilities (weekly cadence, decision authority, deliverables), Things I hate (visceral pet peeves the agent should avoid).

• assets/goals-and-context.md — frontmatter (privacy: project-private) + sections: Current goals (this quarter), Longer-term goals (year+), How I think about tradeoffs (default positions), What I'm NOT prioritizing, Areas of expertise, Key terminology (jargon I use without needing definitions), Where I'm a beginner (topics where I want more explanation).

• assets/team-and-relationships.md — frontmatter (privacy: user-private) + per-person blocks: Name, Role, Relationship type, How we interact, What they need from me, What I need from them, Context for agents (sensitivities, communication style, preferences). Lives in context/owner/private/ by convention.

The interview protocol

See references/interview-protocol.md. It contains the per-file question list, the order, and the discipline rules (sequential not batched, draft after 3-4 questions, validate before saving, never edit silently).

Observable signals

See references/observable-signals.md. A table of patterns the agent should watch for during normal work, organized by category (communication, technical preferences, decision patterns, workflow patterns). Each row describes the signal, how to observe it, and an example recorded preference.

The privacy convention

Privacy tiers are enforced by directory layout:

The aibox .gitignore includes context/**/private/ which matches private/ directories at any depth under context/. aibox lint (Phase 4.4) verifies that any entity with privacy: user-private lives under a private/ directory.

Why these four and not the original ten

The portfolio source (nlwhittemore/personal-context-portfolio) proposes ten files. We merged for context efficiency:

Net: 10 portfolio files → 4 owner-profiling files. Roughly half the loaded context for a typical session, with no information loss for the workflows we care about.

Relationship to the Actor primitive

owner-profiling does NOT replace the Actor primitive. They serve different purposes:

• Actor entities (under context/actors/) — structured records of every person/agent/service that participates in the project. Used for assignments, bindings, role-binding lookups. Machine-readable.
• owner-profiling files (under context/owner/) — the project owner's rich personal context, in prose, optimized for the agent reading them at session start. Human-authored.

The owner is also an Actor entity (ACTOR-owner typically), but their Actor file is a thin pointer to the rich owner/ files. The Actor file might say bio_files: ["context/owner/identity.md", "context/owner/working-style.md"] so any tool that wants the owner's profile knows where to look.

Multi-actor profiles (future)

The current design assumes a single owner per project. A future extension could put each actor's profile under context/actors/<actor-id>/ with the same four-file structure. The actor-profile skill would learn about this layout. v0.4.0 ships only the owner case.

MCP server

None in v0.4.0. The skill is markdown-only. The agent reads/writes the files via the standard file-edit tool. If patterns of use justify a server in a future release (e.g. "validate the privacy tier matches the directory" as a tool call), it can be added; until then, the simplicity of "just files" wins.