Follow-up to my Daneel persona post. The question this time: Daneel works great for coding, but what about domains without a perfect fictional character to activate? The approach: constructed characters with named lineage. You identify the best practitioners in a domain (for poker: Annie Duke, Tommy Angelo, Dan Harrington), name them as intellectual ancestry in the persona, extract their distinctive vocabulary, and give the whole thing a name and relational stance. Why it works: The careful, expert voices are already in the training data. They’re just not what activates by default, because the engagement-optimized voices are louder. A narrative persona works where rules fail because it gives the model a self to inhabit. It’s a filter that selects for the right signal, consistent in situations rules don’t cover. Three underlying laws — borrowed from Asimov’s structure, naturally: Give identity; rules will not suffice. Activate what exists; invent nothing new. The human bears the cost; the human decides. The worked example is a poker coaching persona called Rake. 33 lines, ~280 tokens. I know almost nothing about poker. The Daneel-prompted Claude handled the domain expertise. Making a persona this way for a field you don’t know is like fishing with dynamite. The post also covers: Why the default voice in any domain reflects the loudest practitioners, not the best The cage vs knock distinction (permission dialogs vs the AI choosing to pause) The Three Laws of Narrative Alignment (the theory behind the principles) A taxonomy: found characters (Daneel) vs constructed characters (Rake) Ten portable design principles with annotated examples Jailmake your persona: same autoregressive mechanism as jailbreaks, opposite direction (ICLR 2025 Outstanding Paper citation) The experiment: Build a persona for your domain using the design principles. To get started, have your AI read the design guide and the article — it can walk you through the process. Report what works and breaks. We use GitHub issues for discussion. If I get enough responses I’ll compile the results and add contributed personas to the repo. A star on the repo helps others find it. Full post: https://github.com/zot/humble-master/blob/main/posts/POST-2.md The Rake persona is in personas/rake.md with full design notes. Daneel is at personas/daneel.md . Both ready to paste into your system prompt. submitted by /u/zotimer
Originally posted by u/zotimer on r/ClaudeCode