cowork

cowork — personas for Claude Code

cowork is an optional plugin on top of Claude Code (and integrates automatically with voice/bridges if both are installed). It turns a single coding agent into a pool of roles that switch depending on the chat or CLI call.

Mental model

chat_profiles[<chat>].persona = "browser"
        │
        ▼
cowork.resolver.resolve("browser", overrides=chat_profile)
        │
        ▼
{cwd, mcp_servers, tools, append_system, permission_mode}
        │
        ▼
claude --mcp-config ... --append-system-prompt ... --add-dir ...

What you, as Claude, need to know

• Personas live in JSON files under operator/cowork/personas/ (bundle) or ~/.config/claude-cowork/personas/ (user; shadows the bundle).
• Schema: name, description, permission_mode, allowed_tools, disallowed_tools, append_system, model, mcp_servers (dict in Claude Code MCP config format), add_dirs (list), needs_keys, needs_oauth, zero_config (bool).
• Voice integration is additive: chat_profiles[<chat>].persona = "..." is a new optional field next to permission_mode / allowed_tools / etc. Profile fields merge on top of the persona (lists union, scalars overwrite, append_system concatenates).
• Hot-reload remains: the persona file is read fresh per inbox message, no restart needed.
• Standalone: cowork run <persona> -p "..." runs claude locally without involving voice/bridges.

When the user asks ...

• "which personas do I have" → /cowork-list
• "what can persona X do" → /cowork-show X
• "make this chat the browser persona" → /cowork-bind <channel> <chat> browser
• "undo that" → /cowork-unbind <channel> <chat>
• "I want to give inbox its own MCP servers" → /cowork-add inbox (copies it into the user dir, then edit)
• "test browser persona without the bridge" → /cowork-run browser -p "..."

What NOT to do

• Never set chat_profiles.default.persona without an explicit request — that would reroute every chat (same footgun rule as for chat_profiles.default in the voice plugin).
• Never claim a persona "is running" when mcp_servers is empty and needs_oauth / needs_keys are not satisfied. Give a setup hint instead.