Personas

A persona is a saved system prompt: standing instructions that shape how the AI answers. A devil's advocate who attacks every claim, an editor who tightens prose, a tutor who explains step by step. You write it once and put it on any chat node.

Each chat node can have its own persona, so branches of one conversation can look at the same material through different lenses.

Create and manage personas

1. Open Settings and click Persona Prompts (under Templates).
2. Click Create Persona.
3. Fill in the form:
   • Name: how the persona appears in menus.
   • Color: a swatch that marks its card on the Persona Prompts page.
   • Prompt: the instructions the AI follows, such as what role to play, what to look for and how to shape the answer.
4. Click Create.

You can also create one from a chat: click + in the message box, open Personalities and choose Add New. The new persona isn't applied until you check it.

To edit a persona, click its card on the Persona Prompts page, change any field and click Update. Chats that use it follow the new version from their next message. To delete it, open the card, click Delete, then Yes, Delete.

Note: Turn a persona off in the chats that use it before you delete it. A chat whose persona was deleted fails to send until you pick a different persona there.

Apply a persona to a chat

• Tools menu: click + (tooltip "Tools") in the message box, open Personalities and check a persona.
• Slash menu: type /, open Personas and pick one, or type part of its name. See Slash commands, skills and prompts.

A chat holds one persona at a time; picking another replaces it. The active one has a check mark in both menus (the / menu adds "Active, select to remove"). The chat node itself doesn't show it, so open either menu to check. To turn a persona off, pick it again.

The persona applies from your next message, and replies already in the chat stay as they are. It affects only this chat: other chats, even connected ones, keep their own.

Branches you fork from a chat start with the parent's persona, and changing it in the branch leaves the parent alone. The exception is a chat dragged out of a handle, which starts with none. See Branching.

Personas work in every mode except Orchestrator. The menus still let you check one there, but it has no effect in that mode.

Example: two lenses on one question

Say a chat about putting your newsletter behind a paywall is connected to your reader survey and two competitors' pricing pages.

1. Create a "Devil's advocate" persona ("Argue against the plan. Find its weakest assumptions and the strongest counterevidence.") and an "Operator" persona ("Turn the plan into steps, costs and risks, and name the first thing to measure.").
2. In the chat's message box, press ⌘B (Ctrl+B on Windows and Linux) twice to make two empty branches.
3. Put Devil's advocate on one branch and Operator on the other, then send both "Should I do this?"

Both branches read the same conversation and sources through their parent, so only the persona differs.

Where personas are stored

Personas live on this computer, in Slashspace's app data folder rather than with your canvases (on a Mac, ~/Library/Application Support/Slashspace/config/persona-prompts.json). They don't sync between devices. A chat node records only which persona it uses, so a copied canvas arrives without its personas.

A persona's text is sent to the model with each message, like the rest of the conversation.