Agents Reference
GoMad ships eight agent personas spanning the four workflow phases — Analysis, Planning, Solutioning, and Implementation. Each persona is invoked from a launcher-form slash command (the table below shows the exact form) whose stub lives at .claude/commands/gm/agent-<shortName>.md and whose persona body is loaded fresh at runtime from <installRoot>/_config/agents/<shortName>.md. The persona body is never bundled into the command stub; it is read from disk on every invocation, which means edits to the persona file take effect on the next call without rebuilding or reinstalling.
All personas
Section titled “All personas”| Persona | Slash command | Phase | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mary | /gm:agent-analyst | Analysis | Strategic business analyst and requirements expert. Use when the user asks to talk to Mary or requests the business analyst. |
| Paige | /gm:agent-tech-writer | Analysis | Technical documentation specialist and knowledge curator. Use when the user asks to talk to Paige or requests the tech writer. |
| John | /gm:agent-pm | Planning | Product manager for PRD creation and requirements discovery. Use when the user asks to talk to John or requests the product manager. |
| Sally | /gm:agent-ux-designer | Planning | UX designer and UI specialist. Use when the user asks to talk to Sally or requests the UX designer. |
| Winston | /gm:agent-architect | Solutioning | System architect and technical design leader. Use when the user asks to talk to Winston or requests the architect. |
| Amelia | /gm:agent-dev | Implementation | Senior software engineer for story execution and code implementation. Use when the user asks to talk to Amelia or requests the developer agent. |
| Bob | /gm:agent-sm | Implementation | Scrum master for sprint planning and story preparation. Use when the user asks to talk to Bob or requests the scrum master. |
| Barry | /gm:agent-solo-dev | Implementation | Elite full-stack developer for rapid spec and implementation. Use when the user asks to talk to Barry or requests the quick flow solo dev. |
Choosing a persona
Section titled “Choosing a persona”Reach for an Analysis-phase persona when you are still framing the problem space. The Analyst drives early discovery, market research, and brainstorming. The Tech Writer is the right hand once you need to capture findings, draft documentation, or polish prose for the docs site.
Move to Planning-phase personas once the problem is understood and you need to commit to a shape. The PM authors PRDs and product briefs that downstream coding agents can act on directly. The UX Designer covers user-experience work — flows, surface specs, and interaction notes that the PRD references.
Use a Solutioning-phase persona when the requirements are settled and the next question is “how should we build this?”. The Architect produces system designs, decomposes the PRD into epics and stories, and runs implementation-readiness checks before any code lands.
Switch to an Implementation-phase persona when sprint mechanics begin. The Scrum Master creates and refines stories. The Dev executes them — read story, write code, write tests, raise PRs. The Solo Dev, Barry, is the eighth persona — added post-fork as a single-developer-mode hybrid that compresses the Scrum Master and Dev loop for solo workflows where ceremony overhead outweighs role separation.
How invocation works
Section titled “How invocation works”Every persona is invoked through the same launcher-form contract. A slash command of the shape shown in the table above loads a thin stub at .claude/commands/gm/agent-<shortName>.md. The stub is generated by gomad install from the persona’s skill-manifest.yaml; it carries metadata (display name, title, icon) so Claude Code can surface the persona in its UI.
When the slash command fires, the stub instructs the assistant to read the persona body from <installRoot>/_config/agents/<shortName>.md. That file is the canonical source of truth for the persona’s behavior, voice, and constraints — the stub never duplicates it. Reading the body fresh on each invocation means a persona edit takes effect immediately, with no rebuild step.
For the deeper architectural picture — how launcher-form slash commands fit alongside skills, the manifest-v2 installer, and the four-phase workflow — see GoMad architecture.
Customizing personas
Section titled “Customizing personas”Persona files at <installRoot>/_config/agents/*.md are owned by the installer. A subsequent gomad install (for example, an upgrade) regenerates them from src/gomad-skills/*/gm-agent-*/SKILL.md and may overwrite local edits.