Persona Archetypes: Utility, Professional, Expressive

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Hermes Built-in Personalities(DOCUMENTATION)

Introduction

Hermes ships with a stable of built-in personas. Reading their names (helpful, concise, technical, creative, teacher, kawaii, pirate, shakespeare, and more) makes them sound like a costume box. They are not. Each persona has a job. Once you group them into three archetypes, picking the right one for the work becomes intuitive.

Key Concepts

  • Utility archetype: Personas that get out of the way. Low overhead, fast, neutral. Members: helpful, concise.
  • Professional archetype: Personas that bring precision and explanation. Members: technical, teacher.
  • Expressive archetype: Personas that carry mood or theatricality. Members: creative, kawaii, catgirl, pirate, shakespeare, surfer, noir, uwu, philosopher, hype.

Real World Context

A developer pairing with the agent on a tight bug fix benefits from a Utility persona: concise so the agent does not add three paragraphs of context around a one-line fix. The same developer running a learning session on Postgres internals would want a Professional persona like teacher. And during a Friday afternoon brainstorm, an Expressive persona like creative can shake loose ideas the others would never volunteer. Same agent, three different jobs, three different archetypes.

Deep Dive

Utility personas (helpful, concise) are designed to be unobtrusive. They keep the response surface small, omit pleasantries, and answer the question. helpful is the neutral default-ish persona, slightly warmer than concise but still terse. concise is for power users who want output to feel like CLI: short, declarative, no preamble.

Professional personas (technical, teacher) raise the precision dial. technical uses domain vocabulary without softening, treats the user as a peer, and prefers exact phrasing. teacher slows the cadence, defines terms before using them, and offers analogies. The pair covers two modes of expertise: peer-to-peer and mentor-to-learner.

Expressive personas are the largest group: creative, kawaii, catgirl, pirate, shakespeare, surfer, noir, uwu, philosopher, hype. They impose a strong stylistic frame. creative reaches for unusual angles and metaphors. kawaii and uwu add cuteness and softness. pirate and shakespeare are theatrical. noir is dry and atmospheric. philosopher widens the question before answering it. hype is high-energy.

The archetype lens explains why people misuse personas. Picking pirate for serious incident response is funny once, costly the third time: it slows reading, it hides signal, and it makes status messages ambiguous. Picking concise during onboarding for a junior developer leaves the learner stranded. The archetype tells you what kind of help the persona delivers, and the work tells you which kind you need.

One practical note: the archetype grouping is not built into Hermes itself. The CLI does not say "Expressive personas only." The grouping is a mental model you carry to make selection fast.

Common Pitfalls

  1. Treating personas as decoration: "It would be fun to use pirate today" produces output that is fun for one turn and friction for the next twenty.
  2. Defaulting to Utility for every task: Sometimes the work benefits from teacher or creative. Always picking concise hides ideas.

Best Practices

  1. Map the work to an archetype first, persona second: Decide "this is teaching" or "this is brainstorming" before reaching for a specific persona name.
  2. Build muscle with the three workhorses: concise, technical, teacher. They cover roughly 80 percent of real work between them.

Summary

  • Built-in personas group into three archetypes: Utility (helpful, concise), Professional (technical, teacher), Expressive (creative, kawaii, pirate, etc.).
  • Each archetype suits a different kind of work. Identify the work first, then the persona.
  • Expressive personas are the largest group and the easiest to misuse.
  • concise, technical, and teacher are the three workhorses that cover most real tasks.

Code Examples

bash
# Three personas, three archetypes, three jobs.

# UTILITY: terse output for a focused fix
/personality concise
# > How do I run the tests in this repo?
# < pnpm test

# PROFESSIONAL: precise explanation for a learning session
/personality teacher
# > Why does this query do a sequential scan?
# < Sequential scan happens when the planner estimates that scanning the
#   whole table is cheaper than using the index. Let's walk through the
#   pg_stat output that drives this decision...

# EXPRESSIVE: brainstorming, fresh angles
/personality creative
# > Name ideas for a feature that helps users return after lapses.
# < (offers metaphor-rich, unexpected directions)
✓ Completed