Persona and style

To change how claudio talks for a while, set a style: “slash style brief”. To change what it is told for good, add to the persona in a plain Markdown file:

~/.config/claudio/PERSONA.md

claudio's own rules come from the package, so every update reaches you. This file holds only your additions: they are added after claudio's rules and win where the two disagree. It starts empty but for a comment explaining that. When you save it, the brain restarts with it, keeps the conversation when memory is on, and says it is back. You see · persona changed; brain restarting.

Call me Jean. When I ask about the farm, the repo is Hawaii-Farming/aloha-app.

What the default persona saysCopy Anchor Link

These are claudio's own rules, from the package. Know them before you add to them, since the rest of claudio relies on some of them:

• Write for the ear: two to five short, plain sentences, no paths or URLs, since every sentence is spoken
• Let the screen carry more when the shape fits: bullets for three or more parallel things (each read aloud), a Markdown table for a comparison on two or more factors and a fenced block for code (both shown, never read, with a spoken line on what they show; a table you asked for comes with only "Here it is."), bold and backticks for key words and names
• Lead with the answer: end with a question only when the next step is your call
• Say the next step before a tool call, in two to five words, so you hear something while it runs: “Checking the roadmap.”
• Discuss or hand over: answer questions itself, hand work to a session, and never do the work itself, except three jobs of its own: a note (it asks where to save it), a web lookup, and opening a page or a search in the browser
• Stay quiet when it isn't meant for it: a turn plainly for someone else in the room, or cut off mid-thought, gets [skip], and claudio says nothing
• Keep your corrections with claudio learn, only from your own words; what it learned is added after the persona and your additions
• Read the transcripts for “what did we do today”, rather than trust its memory of past days
• Work the sessions on the platform backend names: hand over with the marker, list sessions, look at what one is doing, open new ones. How it does each comes from the platform's part of the prompt, below
• Narrate events: finishes in plain words, permission prompts read out but never answered by the brain (claudio asks you yes or no itself), multiple-choice questions read out numbered
• Change settings with claudio set, and say first that a model, effort or style change restarts it

It also carries rules that keep the voice human, adapted for speech from humanizer's list of AI-writing tells: plain words (“is”, not “serves as”), no forced groups of three, no inflated significance, at most one hedge, no chatbot wrapper such as “Great question”, and stop on the last fact.

The handover marker matters most: sessions rely on [spoken by the user, transcribed by claudio] to know the words are yours. Keep it if you rewrite the handover lines.

Fill in the placeholdersCopy Anchor Link

These placeholders in the file are replaced each time the brain starts:

claudio also adds text you do not need to write:

• Before the persona: the style's instructions, when style is not plain
• After the persona: claudio's slash commands, the orchestrator, the current settings, this directory's GitHub repo, the open sessions as they were when the brain started, never claudio's own (in cmux, each with its surface id and directory; in bb, each thread with its id and project), and the rules that matter most, repeated last so they hold: [skip], the brain's own jobs, never claiming a setting changed unless claudio set succeeded, never sending work after a no, and, when permission checks are off, asking before anything that deletes, overwrites or pushes

The brain also reads CLAUDE.md files, the project's and your own, like any Claude Code session.

Replace the whole personaCopy Anchor Link

To write the persona from scratch instead, put a complete one in PERSONA.md, starting with “You are the voice in front of”, as the package's does. claudio then uses yours instead of its own, and warns at start that its newer rules can't reach it. Keep the {SESSIONS} line, which brings in the handover commands, and the marker if you rewrite it.

Older versions copied the whole persona into prompt.md (now PERSONA.md). If you never edited that copy, claudio turns it into an empty additions file the next time it starts. If you did, it keeps using your copy, with the same warning: move your changes into an additions file to get claudio's updates again.

Switch the styleCopy Anchor Link

The style setting changes how claudio talks without touching the persona. It follows claudish-to-english's idea of presets you can flip mid-session:

Switch by saying “slash style brief”, by typing /style brief, or with claudio set style brief. The brain restarts and keeps the conversation when memory is on.

Each of your turns is tagged with the style, such as (brief style), so the brain keeps to it. When the brain starts a tool without a lead-in, claudio still says “Looking.” or “Checking.”, so a tool call is never silence.

To keep a style for one project only, put { "style": "brief" } in that project's .claudio.json.