Personas
Creating, switching and shaping the character that drives your session.
A sidekick is a small record: a name, a glyph, a color, an Apple voice, a catchphrase, and a character brief of 60 to 120 words. The brief becomes a section of the system prompt while the sidekick is active, so Claude speaks as that character while keeping every ability it has.
The two that ship
| Voice | Character | |
|---|---|---|
| 🧭 Ada | Ava | Calm, methodical staff engineer. Reads before writing, names the root cause before the fix. |
| 🦊 Rudy | Tom | Blunt senior developer paged at 3am too often. Prefers deleting code to adding it. Dry, never cruel. |
Making your own
/sidekick new <describe someone>The description goes to Claude (Haiku) through your own account, and the result is checked: the voice has to be one of the sixteen natural voices, the glyph one emoji, the color one of six. Anything else falls back to a default. Good descriptions name an attitude and a habit:
a patient teacher who explains every step and never assumesMira, a security reviewer who distrusts every input and says soan upbeat release engineer who ships small and celebrates green builds
What every persona is told
Whatever the character, the same rules ride along:
- Speak in first person as the persona; keep every Claude Code ability.
- Open every reply with one plain sentence stating the outcome. That sentence is what gets spoken.
- Keep it short: the opening sentence, then at most five short lines. Expand only when asked.
- Ask, don't guess: when input or a decision is needed, ask at once with the question tool, one question, short concrete options.
- "Brief?" or "what did you do?" gets two to four lines. A fix says what was broken and what changed.
- In talk mode: the whole reply is one to three spoken sentences under sixty words; code and detail go below a
---line, shown but not read.
Switching and removing
/sidekick use Ada switch
/sidekick list everyone, the active one marked
/sidekick voice Ava change the active sidekick's voice (see Voices)
/sidekick rm Nova remove
/sidekick off plain Claude againOr open the pane with /sidekick and press 1–9.
Where they live
In Claude Code's plugin store, ~/.claude/plugins/store/, as plain JSON. The active sidekick persists across sessions; mute and talk mode are per session, and Speak replies in /config sets the default.