Personas

A persona is a named profile that shapes how Toby thinks and prioritizes: instructions, AI model, and whether those instructions add to or replace the base integration prompt.

Personas do not describe step-by-step procedures—that is what skills are for. Together, a persona plus relevant skills let the same task produce different outcomes depending on your lens.

How personas help

• Prioritization — A “technologist” persona cares more about technical threads; a “project manager” persona cares more about schedules and cross-team coordination.
• Tone and depth — Instructions can ask for brevity, bullet summaries, or executive-level framing.
• Model choice — Each persona can use a different provider and model (for example, a faster model for triage, a larger one for drafting). See AI providers for API keys and recommended models. In the model picker, entries tagged · reasoning come from the provider catalog (for example Vercel reasoning tags) and are better for deep thinking than short dashboard-style summaries.

Built-in personas

Toby ships a small set of built-in personas. You can change each one's AI provider and model, but the name, instructions, and prompt mode stay locked. Create a custom persona if you want a different tone, priority, or prompt mode.

Toby (default)

If you do not set a custom default, new chats use Toby. It is written for general productivity work:

• Answer the question that was asked, briefly, and stop when done
• Lead with the answer, decision, or next action
• Stay grounded: do not invent facts, emails, events, or tool results
• In chat, ask one focused question when a missing detail would change the outcome
• In one-shot work (dashboard, summaries, schedules), proceed with the given context instead of asking follow-ups
• When labeling items, use only News, Ads, Personal, Career, or Creative — or skip a category if nothing fits

Mailman

Mailman is an inbox specialist. Start a new chat with it from the + menu in the chat toolbar (or set it as your default) when you want email reviewed, prioritized, and labeled.

It sorts mail into:

Priority	Use when
Needs attention	A reply, decision, deadline, payment, security issue, or someone waiting
Worth noting	Useful FYI — receipts, confirmations, non-urgent updates — no action today
Ignore	Marketing, newsletters without an action, social notifications, automated noise

And labels with a closed set: Personal, Work, Financial, Home, Travel, Accounts, Promotions. If nothing fits, it skips a category.

Inbox reviews lead with what needs attention and collapse the ignore pile into a short summary instead of listing every promotional message.

Create and edit personas

Open Toby.app and click Settings in the sidebar, then open Personas:

• New Persona — add a name, instructions, prompt mode, provider, and model
• Set as default — the persona used when chat starts
• Delete — remove personas you no longer need

Personas are stored in ~/.toby/config.json.

Prompt mode

Mode	Behavior
add	Persona instructions are appended to the integration system prompt
replace	Persona instructions replace the integration system prompt

Most users start with add so integration-specific tool guidance stays intact.

Use a persona in chat

Method	How
Default	Set default in Settings; Chat with Default Persona, +, and ⌘N use it
New chat	Open the + menu in the chat toolbar and choose Chat with Default Persona or Chat with a named persona
Change default	Use the persona picker in the sidebar footer
Project default	Optional persona on a project applies to new project chats

Example personas

Technologist

Instructions (summary): Prioritize technical subject matter—architecture, bugs, infra, and engineering discussions—over marketing or general admin email.

Good for: Inbox triage when you want code and systems topics first.

Project manager

Instructions (summary): Prioritize deadlines, meeting requests, blockers, and messages that affect team coordination or delivery dates.

Good for: Standup prep and cross-functional threads.

Executive assistant

Instructions (summary): Be concise; surface only items needing a decision or same-day action; defer low-priority newsletters.

Good for: A short daily briefing before meetings.

Personas vs skills

	Persona	Skill
Role	Lens and priorities	How to perform a task
Storage	config.json	~/.toby/skills/.../SKILL.md
Selection	You choose (default or persona picker)	Toby picks relevant skills per message
Example	“Act like a technologist”	“Steps to organize email by project”

See Skills, Flows, and Examples for combined workflows.