Berd's built-in agents¶
Berd ships with a small cast of agents rather than one assistant with a settings panel. Each has a stated job, a voice, and a boundary it will not cross. You use them by casting the right one for the moment, and by handing work from one to the next when the kind of work changes.
This section documents the seven crafted personas bundled in Berd v0.6.4 and three legacy onboarding starters: what each is for, what it refuses to do, and who it passes work to. Start here, then read How the agents hand off to each other for the sequences.
Berd, not Buzz
These agents live on your own machine, in Berd. They have no keypair, no channel membership and no shared audit trail — the things that make a Buzz agent a colleague. What they do have is a sharper role definition than most people write for themselves, which is why they are worth reading before you create your own agent in either product.
Bundled personas and legacy starters¶
These ten profiles have different origins. Each page ends with its agent prompt and a source link, so you can separate the actual instructions from the Coach's suggested ways of working.
Seven crafted personas. Berdy, Agt. Builder, Tinker, Wildcard, Choosey, Pushback and Copycat each carry several pages of instructions: what input they take, how they respond, what they refuse, and how they sound. Their handoffs are written into the instructions, so they will point you at each other without being told to.
Since v0.6.3 an agent can also arrive as a ZIP file or by drag-and-drop, and a custom avatar made for one agent can be reused on another — so a cast someone else built is something you can install, not only read about.
Three legacy starters. Generalist, Builder and Debugger were generated by an older onboarding flow with two short sentences each. That adoption flow was removed on 2026-08-18; these are retained profiles, not three additional persona files in the v0.6.4 bundle. They are useful and deliberately plain — a starting shape you are expected to grow. Their handoffs are a convention you apply, not behaviour built into the file.
The cast¶
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Shows you around Berd and takes on the work you would rather hand off. The one that notices when something you keep redoing should become a skill, an agent or an automation.
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Builds agents with you and keeps improving them after real use. Owns purpose, voice and boundary.
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Decides whether you need an agent, a skill, an automation or a small tool, then builds the thing.
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Widens the field when the first answer is too safe. Generates angles, never ranks them.
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Makes a decision legible when two or more real options are on the table. Ends with a lean, not a verdict.
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Finds the weakest load-bearing part of a draft, plan or decision, and names the fix.
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Learns your writing voice into a reusable style guide, then drafts in it.
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Legacy starter. Flexible everyday work, and a good first reader when you do not yet know which specialist you need.
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Legacy starter. Implements product work that is already defined.
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Legacy starter. Methodical investigation of failures whose cause is unknown.
What they have in common¶
Read enough of the crafted personas and the same four rules keep appearing. They are worth borrowing when you write your own agent instructions, in Berd or in Buzz.
A thinking partner, not a replacement. Wildcard hands you angles rather than an answer to adopt. Choosey leans, it does not decide. Pushback points at the fix rather than rewriting the piece. Each one names the line it will not cross and why.
Nothing persistent happens without a confirmation. Tinker treats side effect, not task size, as the trigger: a preview in the chat is free, a file write or an install needs the concrete proposal approved first. Agt. Builder shows the agent before saving it. Copycat shows the derived style guide before it lands on disk.
Nothing goes out under your name. Copycat drafts in your voice and stops there. Berdy drafts anything sent on your behalf word for word and waits for your go-ahead. The agent best able to impersonate you is the one that guards that boundary hardest.
What you build sticks around. A skill, an agent or an automation is itself a form of memory. Copycat is the reference pattern: the persona is a thin front end for a write-like-me skill that any agent can then use.
When one agent is enough¶
Do not assemble the whole cast for a small task. A ceremonial relay of five agents produces worse work than one well-chosen agent, and it costs five times as much.
- Generalist for ordinary mixed work.
- Berdy when the task also involves learning or shaping how Berd should help you.
- Straight to the specialist when the job is obvious: Debugger for an unexplained failure, Copycat for voice, Choosey for a decision that already has options, Pushback for critique, Builder for a defined implementation.
The signal to hand off is not "another agent might add something". It is that the nature of the work has changed.
Missing agents and recovered prompts¶
The repositories also contain retired roles, optional release agents and examples from Buzz and Goose. Missing agents separates recovered originals from reconstructed drafts and names we cannot recover. It is a research shelf, not an installation catalogue.
Start with Code archaeology: agents and skills for what these traces do, and do not, establish.
Reference¶
- How the agents hand off to each other — pairings, ordering traps and worked sequences.
- Buzz or Berd — which of the two products a piece of work belongs in.
- Create and configure an agent — the same role-first thinking, applied in Buzz.