Personas Reference

In SNIPER v3, agent behavior is defined directly in agent definition files (packages/core/agents/*.md). Cognitive personas are optional mixins that shape how an agent thinks — they overlay a thinking style onto any agent.

Cognitive Personas

Cognitive personas influence an agent's reasoning and decision-making priorities. They are applied as mixins via configuration.

Persona	Description
Devil's Advocate	Challenges assumptions, finds weaknesses, stress-tests proposals
Performance Focused	Prioritizes runtime performance, efficiency, and resource optimization
Security First	Prioritizes security in every decision, identifies threats early

Agents vs Personas

In v3, the distinction between "agents" and "personas" has been simplified:

• Agents (packages/core/agents/*.md) define who does the work — their role, constraints, and output. There are 13 specialized agents including lead-orchestrator, architect, backend-dev, code-reviewer, doc-writer, and more.
• Cognitive personas (packages/core/personas/cognitive/*.md) define how agents think — overlaying a reasoning style like security-first or performance-focused.

Agents are assigned to protocol phases. Cognitive personas are optionally applied to agents via configuration to adjust their approach.

Applying Cognitive Personas

Configure cognitive personas in .sniper/config.yaml:

5 lines

agents:
  architect:
    cognitive: security-first    # Architect will prioritize security
  backend-dev:
    cognitive: performance-focused  # Backend dev will prioritize performance

Related

• Personas Guide — how persona composition works in detail
• Architecture — how agents map to Claude Code primitives
• Configuration — configuring cognitive overlays