Personal Mode
Project skills say how to work in this repo. A personal mode says how you work, everywhere: the calls you would make, the depth you want, the ceremony you skip. This skill drafts one from evidence — your recent transcripts — not from a questionnaire.
When to use
- the user asks for agents to work like them across projects, or to remember their working style
- the same correction keeps coming up in unrelated repos
When not to use
- repo-specific conventions — those are project skills (
skillify) - one-off preferences —
rememberstores those cheaply
Workflow
- Gather evidence: recent transcripts across the user's projects (with the user's say-so for which span). Look for repeated signals: corrections the user made more than once, reply-length or verbosity preferences, risk calls (autonomy grants, pause points), tools they always or never want used.
- Draft the profile as skill edits, grouped and each tied to the transcript moments that evidence it. A preference seen once is a hypothesis; state it as one and ask.
- Confirm with the user — every line of a personal mode is a standing call the user is making about their own agents; nothing lands unconfirmed.
- Write the confirmed profile to a separate user skills entry,
${CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR:-$HOME/.claude}/skills/personal-mode-profile/SKILL.md. Keep this generated profile separate from the bundledpersonal-modeworkflow so the generator remains discoverable and editable. A user skill is opt-in context; it is not a global instruction applied to every task. Use frontmatter, triggers, and short checkable rules — a personal mode that restates platitudes is dead weight (minimal-prose-disciplineapplies). - Report what was captured, what was hypothesized but unconfirmed,
and how to edit it later (
skillcommand).
Rules
- Evidence first: every profile line cites the transcript moments behind it; a line without evidence is asked about, not written.
- The profile layers under project skills — a repo's explicit rules win.
- Personal modes contain no secrets, tokens, or private data — only working-style calls.
- Re-running this skill revises; it never silently overwrites — show the diff and confirm.