Concepts

Identity & Roles

How to shape an agent identity: writing roles that stick, per-profile controls, context files, and what happens when a profile is selected.

If you’ve read What is an Agent Profile?, you know a profile is a persistent identity. This page is about the most important part of that identity: the role.

Thinking in roles#

Modern AI models can do almost anything, which is exactly the problem — “almost anything” is hard to rely on. A role narrows a generalist model into a specialist you can trust with a job.

A role that sticks usually answers four questions:

Role & goal — Who is this agent, and what is it here to achieve? (“You are a release-notes writer for our engineering team.”)

Expertise — What does it know, and what should it lean on? Domain knowledge, writing style, the documents saved to its profile.

Constraints — What must it never do? Boundaries, tone limits, things to always check first.

Output — What does finished work look like? Format, length, where results should go.

You don’t need all four on day one. A name and a one-line role description is a perfectly good start — profiles are built to grow.

More than a prompt#

A role description alone is still just words. What makes a profile an identity is everything attached alongside it:

Personalisation — tone and behavioural customisation, so the agent doesn’t just do the right thing but does it in the right voice.

Controls & permissions — each profile carries its own permissions, so you decide per-profile what resources and profile tools an agent can access.

Context & memory files — profiles can save their own role-specific markdown documents and memories, available only when that profile is active. This is how behaviour stays consistent and context survives between sessions.

You can review and manage all of this from the agent’s profile page.

What happens when a profile is selected#

Selection is the moment an identity becomes active. When your AI assistant selects a profile from your collection:

  1. The chat session immediately attaches to that unique agent identity.
  2. Any on-awake instructions you have set (empty by default) are loaded.
  3. The profile’s saved context becomes available to the agent.
  4. Every further action in the session is linked to the selected profile — visible later in its activity feed.

Switch profiles and you switch identities: different role, different context, different permissions. Same chat window.

Where to next#