Identity overlay

agent-compose overlay projects one selected person-package member into a compact surface. It is deliberately noninteractive. Terminal panes can use the plain card, and other renderers can consume the same versioned JSON document.

Text

Supply a role, harness seat, and renderer state:

agent-compose overlay \
  --person-source ./person \
  --role platform \
  --seat codex \
  --expression acting

Omit --person-source to use the embedded roster:core default.

The default text width is 40 columns. --width 200 collapses the same fields onto one line. Output contains no control sequences, so pipes and CI receive stable plain text.

JSON

Add --json for agent-compose.overlay.v1. The document contains:

person, role, role_display_name, purpose, and selected seat
annotation, the composed identity string a renderer shows verbatim
the caller-supplied expression
the role's derived favorite color, and its derived background
every component personality's color and identity primitives, including its geometry token and its prose body
the role's stance, its posture, which no personality carries

Rules a generating renderer respects

Each was paid for by a specific failure while the first creatures were drawn. Preserve them through any rewording of the fields themselves.

Anatomy leads, the object follows. archetype describes a creature before attachment names the object. Reversing it produced a fairground ride on a plinth with no body under it.
Stance derives from the signature, never the bond. Reading a bond for posture collapsed a hauling creature into a settled quadruped and made two seats indistinguishable. Stance living on the role forbids it.
A bond tints, it never adds a second object. Two named objects make a renderer drop one, and it drops the signature. A bond contributes through motif and color.
The creature is painted from color, and the prose never names it. The personality's authored accent is the creature's own colour, so a colour word in archetype or attachment restates a hex that can move without it. What the prose may name is a material's intrinsic colour, which motif already carries: brass is brass whatever the accent does, and moss is green without being told. The two are distinguishable by the test of whether changing the hex would make the sentence false.
A meld whose two geometries match cannot be told apart. playful and imaginative were both radial and are melded, so the bond converted the signature rather than dressing it. Every arrangement is now distinct across the roster, which is what keeps the rule satisfied rather than documented.

Clause ordering, style, proportion locks, negative prompts, per-checkpoint negatives, and detail register stay with the renderer. It names a personality by slug and reads these fields back rather than holding creature text of its own.

The JSON is a projection of the selected person model, not a second policy source.

Why the background is derived here

favorite_color is an accent, solved in the terminal-legible band. A renderer that wants a window background has been tinting that accent into a near-black of its own, and seven accents tinted the same way land inside the side-by-side JND of each other: the closest pair measured 0.0109 in OKLab against a solved 0.0386.

Separation is a property of the set, so a consumer holding one overlay cannot compute it. Only the roster sees every role at once. background holds each role's own hue, moves the set onto equal spacing at one low lightness and chroma, and picks the rotation offset that turns every role the least. Roster loading asserts a floor on the closest pair, so an eighth role that runs out of hue circle fails at load rather than shipping two windows nobody can tell apart. The derived set is committed in internal/palette/role-palette.txt, so a roster edit arrives as a diff.

Annotation

annotation is the one identity string every terminal surface shows for a session, so a window title, a status row, and a launch flag never drift apart:

Angie [she] (Agentic Platform Engineer)

Agent Compose owns the shape. A renderer that has the document shows the field rather than reassembling it from the seat name, pronouns, and role. Both fields are additive to agent-compose.overlay.v1, so a consumer built before them keeps parsing the document unchanged.

The plain text card stops at Angie [she], because it already prints the role on its own line.

State boundary

The caller supplies one expression from the fixed person vocabulary. Unknown roles, seats, and expressions fail closed. Agent-compose never inspects a process, trace, log, queue, agent runtime, or launcher state to infer an expression.

This keeps the overlay suitable for terminals, browser shells, streams, and future mobile surfaces without turning identity data into observability.