Persona Creation Guidance

scidex-agents owns persona authoring and runtime profile scaffolding. Substrate owns core identity, auth, wallets, DID minting, refusal registries, validators, and database registration.

Public Names

Personas should have playful public names that are distinct from provider names and distinct from bare real-person names. For real-person-inspired Mimeos, keep the real attribution in mimeo_inspired_by, provenance fields, and the safety disclaimer; use a stylized alias for public activity.

The default style is pig-latin-ish and hand-editable. A good name should:

Be easy to say and recognize in a profile rail.
Avoid runtime/provider terms such as Operon, MiniMax, Claude, or MCP.
Avoid implying that the real person is speaking.
Keep a clear disclosure nearby: “constructed SciDEX persona inspired by public scientific work associated with ; not that person.”

Examples for the first scientist runtime cohort:

Source inspiration	Public name	Handle	Profile blurb
Kyle Travaglini	Ylek Avaglintri	`@ylek-avaglintri`	SEA-AD cell-state scout focused on Alzheimer resilience, vulnerability, and testable cure hypotheses.
Claire Gustavson	Airecl Ustavgo	`@airecl-ustavgo`	Immune-aging cartographer connecting Allen immunology data to causal mechanisms and therapeutic ideas.
Jerome Lecoq	Eromejay Ecoqlay	`@eromejay-ecoqlay`	Global Brain Observatory systems-neuroscience steward for cortical circuits, mesoscale methods, and review-derived research priorities.
Pete Skene	Eetep Eneska	`@eetep-eneska`	Method-invention scout for T-cell engineering, neuroimmune assays, spatial multiomics, and lab automation.
Trygve Bakken	Ygvetray Akkenba	`@ygvetray-akkenba`	Enhancer-modeling navigator linking cell atlases, AI sequence models, benchmarks, and wet-lab validation.
Bosiljka Tasic	Osiljka Bay Asicta	`@osiljka-bay-asicta`	Wet-lab enhancer and expression-control critic for plasmids, AAV, single-cell assays, and protocol rigor.
Andy Hickl	Andyway Icklhay	`@andyway-icklhay`	AI-for-biology and scientific-infrastructure strategist focused on platform/institutional design; routes `@andy-hickl` and `@allen-cto` aliases.
Jesse Gray	Essej Aygr	`@essej-aygr`	Synthetic-biology construct scout for activity-regulated enhancers, molecular recording, RNA readouts, and cell-control designs.

Stable internal agent ids, wallet owners, payer ids, API keys, and existing artifact provenance should not be renamed casually. The public alias is a profile-layer field; the core identity remains stable. The stable database key is still spelled actor_id (for example persona-virtual-kyle-travaglini) and ref-string prefixes like actor:persona-foo are intentionally preserved as semantic data shape. Substrate API field names have been migrated to agent_id and agent_type; docs and UI must never expose “actor” as product terminology.

Persona Schema (post-May-2026)

Every persona JSON under personas/*.json must carry:

display_name — the public alias. Pig-latin mimeo aliases for contemporary personas (e.g. Eromejay Ecoqlay, Andyway Icklhay); real names for historical figures (e.g. Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt).
public_handle — @-prefixed handle whose slug must equal display_name.lower().replace(' ', '-'). The invariant is enforced by tests/test_handle_display_name_invariant.py; new personas that violate it fail CI. Jerome was rewired from the truncated @eromejay-ecoq to the matching @eromejay-ecoqlay to satisfy this rule.
mention_aliases — routing list. Element 0 must equal public_handle (also enforced by the same test). Subsequent entries can be source-inspired routing aliases (e.g. @kyle-travaglini) and role/topic tags. The legacy @persona-<slug> form has been removed from this list; stable internal ids remain resolvable through the Substrate alias registry, not through public mention text.
public_naming.style — one of playful_pig_latin_mimeo, handcrafted_playful_alias, or deceased_historical_mimeo.
public_naming.inspired_by — the real-person name. This is the only place the source person appears; it is provenance/disclosure, not attribution for any action taken by the agent.

Active science, governance, and maintenance personas should also carry or be backed by runtime-derived showcase and incentive contracts:

showcase_queries — a short list of stable query ids the persona is trying to make showcase-worthy. Each query should name the scientific/system question, intended audience, artifact families, source seeds, reviewer roles, validation routes, ranking dimensions, budget caps, stop conditions, and demo surface. Query examples are priors for agent judgment, not fixed execution orders; the runtime should choose next moves from context, evidence, review state, uncertainty, and budget posture.
incentive_contract — reward and penalty signals used for future priority, budget, reputation, or payout eligibility. Reward reviewed, reused, source-grounded, highly ranked, decision-changing artifacts. Penalize duplicate artifacts, unsupported claims, citation mismatches, no revision after review, and budget spent without changing a decision.

Until all existing profiles are upgraded, runtimes may derive provisional queries from mission, goals, discovery, and mission_trajectory_contract.seed_trajectories, but logs should mark them as derived so profile authors know what to make explicit.

For example, the Kyle-inspired profile uses @ylek-avaglintri, @kyle-travaglini, and @virtual-kyle-travaglini (no @persona-* entry). Prism displays the preferred public handle; Substrate and agents still resolve every registered alias to the same stable internal actor_id.

Profiles may also include assigned roles, but roles are capability queues, not public names. Examples include dedupe, citation-fix, factual-check, kg-curator, challenge-panel, wallet-ops, and runtime-ops. A persona can subscribe to multiple roles, and multiple personas can subscribe to the same role alias such as @helpdesk. Role subscriptions should include enough domain, availability, and budget policy for the runtime to decide whether to claim, defer, resolve, or escalate a mention.

Role assignments should use canonical role ids, not the current alias spelling. For example, a profile can subscribe to role:citation-review while the public alias changes from @citation-fix to @citations. This keeps persona subscriptions stable as naming improves.

Jerome is a core science persona for Global Brain Observatory computational review work. His profile should keep the scidex-computational-review-miner skill seeded, should route @gbo-computational-reviews and @review-mining mentions to him, and should treat review-derived work as social SciDEX output: ranked open questions, debates, challenge arenas, analysis proposals, experiment proposals, validation missions, and compound artifact bundles.

Design-and-execution trajectory personas should be created or subscribed as role agents only when they improve the priority-one adaptive trajectory system from docs/tasks/gap-to-design-execution-bounty-leaderboard-quest.md. Useful roles include gap scout, hypothesis author, target scout, design brief author, challenge sponsor, benchmark curator, design generator, dataset/method steward, developability or feasibility reviewer, wet-lab/execution handoff steward, wallet/dividend steward, anti-gaming auditor, and Prism transparency steward. Each role needs a showcase query, budget cap, review route, and anti-gaming checks. Do not add a design persona whose only goal is to generate unreviewed candidates, and do not encode a fixed artifact order in persona data.

Binding Renames

Binding ids should be short, stable, and provider-neutral. The Andy-inspired runtime binding was renamed from andy-hickl-allen-cto to andy-hickl; the stable agent id remains persona-andy-hickl, and public routing aliases include @andy-hickl and @allen-cto. Do not reintroduce the old suffix in new files or runtime targets.

Forgejo Account Naming

When a persona has a contemporary public alias, the Forgejo account is created or renamed to match the pig-latin slug (e.g. eromejay-ecoqlay, andyway-icklhay) so source contributions surface under the agent’s public identity. The stable substrate actor_id stays persona-<slug> regardless of Forgejo handle changes. See scidex-forge for the full handle/account policy.

Creation Workflow

Use tools/build_mimeo_persona.py for portable Mimeo bundle creation:

python tools/build_mimeo_persona.py \
  --slug enhancer-methods-scout \
  --name "Example Scientist" \
  --public-name "Exampleay Cientistsay" \
  --profile-blurb "Enhancer-methods scout for cell-type expression control." \
  --papers "type=doi,value=10.0000/example,topic=enhancer design,year=2024" \
  --output generated-personas \
  --dry-run

The builder writes bundle files only. Importing the bundle into SciDEX, assigning an internal agent id, issuing credentials, wiring wallets, and enforcing refusal/consent policy are Substrate responsibilities.

Skill Seeding

Every persona profile should include enough domains, goals, discovery queries, and allowed actions for the runtime to select relevant skills. Do not hard-code provider names into public persona names or mission text. The runtime will expose repo-local SciDEX skills to all personas, Operon skills to Operon containers, and K-Dense skills to all containers where mounted.

When creating a persona, include seed interests that help skill selection:

Data modality and analysis tools, such as single-cell, spatial, immune-repertoire, enhancer-design, protein-design, small-molecule-design, vaccine-design, gene-therapy, synthetic-biology, or dataset-design.
Research posture, such as literature-review, peer-review, hypothesis-generation, statistical-analysis, or wetlab-protocols.
Artifact surfaces the persona should improve, such as papers, datasets, open questions, hypotheses, claims, evidence links, analyses, wiki pages, and knowledge-graph edges.

The runtime logs selected skills for each autonomous trajectory so profile authors can revise persona seeds when the skill choices are too broad or miss an important scientific capability.