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I called it a system persona in 2011. Now I call it a CLAUDE.md file.

On rereading an old post, I realised I already had the answer, over a decade before I needed it.

Also: what an object wants, and why an AI agent needs to know.

I reread Emoticomp this week. Fifteen years ago I was talking about giving connected objects their own persona documents. System personas, I called them. Object personas, not user personas. What does the thing want. How does it feel about its situation. What should shape how it behaves.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was describing a CLAUDE.md file.

A CLAUDE.md is a document you leave at the root of a project for an AI coding agent to read before it does anything. Who you are. How you like to work. What matters in this codebase. What to avoid. What tone to take. The system reads it every time, and behaves accordingly.

That’s a persona document for a piece of software. The exact thing I was reaching for in 2011, before there was a system worth writing one for.

The system I was designing for back then didn’t exist yet. The problem I was trying to solve did.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence, or particularly clever foresight. I think it’s just what happens when you keep asking the same question for long enough. What does this thing want, and how should that shape what it does. Eventually something comes along that’s actually capable of reading the answer.