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 eng-platform \
  --seat codex \
  --expression acting

Omit --person-source to use the embedded roster:core default. The default width is 40 columns, and --width 200 collapses the fields onto one line. Output carries no control sequences, so pipes and CI receive stable plain text.

JSON

Add --json for agent-compose.overlay.v1. It contains:

person, role, role_display_name, purpose, and selected seat
annotation, the composed identity string a renderer shows verbatim
outro, the clean and failure lines a session closes with
identity, the four-part sentence the seat answers "who are you" with, from identity.md. Its legal name is authored per seat and never derived, so a non-model seat answers with its own product name, an unauthored seat drops that clause, and naming it never asserts a model selection
the caller-supplied expression
the role's derived favorite color, and its derived background
every personality's color and identity primitives, with its geometry token and prose body, plus the role's stance, which no personality carries

Rules a generating renderer respects

Each was paid for by a specific failure while the first creatures were drawn.

Anatomy leads, the object follows. archetype describes a creature before attachment names the object. Reversing it produced a fairground ride.
Stance derives from the signature, never the bond. Reading a bond for posture collapsed a hauling creature into a settled quadruped. 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 tints via motif.
The creature is painted from color, and the prose never names it. A color word in archetype or attachment restates a hex that can move without it. The prose may name a material's intrinsic color, which motif carries: brass is brass whatever the accent does. The test is 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 melded, so the bond converted the signature rather than dressing it. Every arrangement is now distinct.

Clause ordering, style, proportion locks, and detail register stay with the renderer, which names a personality by slug and reads these fields back. The JSON projects 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 tinting that accent into a near-black of its own lands seven backgrounds 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 only the roster sees every role at once. background holds each role's hue, spaces the set equally at one low lightness and chroma, and picks the rotation turning 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.

Outro

outro is what a session says as it closes, clean and failure, so the tone differs between finishing and falling over: Measured. The numbers are in the log. against It stopped before the last reading.

Authored per role, not melded. Voice melds because it is read once as doctrine, while an outro is read in half a second by somebody already leaving, and role plus two personalities runs to three sentences, which is a paragraph rather than a banner. It carries voice rather than telemetry for the same reason: whoever reads a closing banner is leaving rather than debugging.

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 (Platform Engineer)

Agent Compose owns the shape, so a renderer with the document shows the field rather than reassembling it from seat name and role. annotation and outro are both additive to agent-compose.overlay.v1, so a consumer built before them keeps parsing unchanged. The plain text card stops at Angie, since 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, and agent-compose never inspects a process, trace, log, queue, runtime, or launcher state to infer one. That keeps the overlay suitable for terminals, browser shells, streams, and future mobile surfaces without turning identity data into observability.