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Persona homepage — the page before the DM

A mockup of the page a user lands on before they message a persona (the DM mode of §6). Its one job: convey who this is and why you'd talk to them — and teach you how to get a good reply — without exposing how the replies are produced. The card block the picker already renders, expanded; plus a taste of voice and a reason to write. Nothing deeper.

The whole design is one line the persona kit already draws: show the character, hide the actor's craft. The profile's card block is labelled "what the picker / roster / chat render"; everything below it — Timeline, Seams, Specific memories, Improvisation framework, Anchor & Extrapolation — is construction. This page renders only the public side of that line.

Switch personas — watch the era line and the portrayal note adapt. The four span the range: real & living, ancient, fictional, and a contemporary semi-anonymous figure.

Show the tip, hide the iceberg

Everything on the homepage is distilled from the profile, but the homepage never reads the profile body — it reads a small public projection authored alongside it (see the note below). Above the line is everything the user sees; below it is the machinery that produces the fidelity, which a public surface must never expose.

SHOWN · who they are — the playbill name & role tagline era — “speaks from…” short bio topics starters voice samples portrayal note the surface HIDDEN · how it's built — the machinery Essence Timeline Seams & tensions Specific memories Voice mechanics Improv. framework Anchor & red lines Corpus & sources tags.txt model & caching the system prompt / megaprompt · the parse harness

The two coral-outlined items are the trap-doors: the portrayal note is the one honesty signal that must surface, and Anchor & red lines is the one piece that must never surface — it's the guardrail spec a jailbreak probes for.

What it shows — and where each piece comes from

BlockWhatPulled from (existing data)
Heroavatar + seat colour, name (+ native script), role, era, taglinethe card block verbatim — already "what the chat renders"
Who they are2–3 sentence biodistilled from Essence + Background, rewritten — never the raw paragraphs
At-a-glance chipsborn · from · language · known-fora curated subset of the At a glance table — [public]/[inferred] tags stripped
Talk about4–6 topic chipsrole + a lay-worded slice of intent (the raw tags.txt stays hidden)
Starters3 seed questionsauthored — doubles as scope-setting (what they're for)
How they talk2–3 sample linesa safe subset of Voice & manner → "they say things like"
Portrayal notethe "AI portrayal of…" lineauthored per persona — see the honesty note below

Highest-leverage, lowest-risk elements: the voice samples and starters. People decide to write based on voice, not a CV — one real-sounding line proves fidelity without explaining a thing.

Two things to decide deliberately

honestyThe portrayal note is the one honest signal — show it, quietly; and it can't be auto-derived. Hiding the machinery is not pretending it's the real person. But the obvious shortcut fails: in this kit origin: real means "anchored to an external corpus," not "is a real human"Buffett, Confucius, and the fictional Sherlock Holmes are all origin: real. So the note must be its own authored field, one line, per type: living person → "…from the public record. Not affiliated with or endorsed by them."; historical → drop the endorsement clause; fictional → credit the author and the canon. For living figures this is also a right-of-publicity guardrail — the same family as the voice-cloning line in §3.
architectureAuthor a small public projection; don't redact the profile at runtime. Add a tiny public: block to the card (blurb, topics, starters, says, portrayal), authored once by the persona pipeline. The homepage renders only from that block and the card head — it never touches profile.md's body, so it structurally cannot leak the interior. That's safer than trusting a summarizer to strip the machinery on every load, and it keeps the kit's single-source rule: the public copy lives in exactly one place.
Dialogue · persona homepage mockup · feeds roadmap §6 · data is faithful to the real personas (Buffett · Confucius · Holmes · 小胖看房) · see also Panel selector · Style guide