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type: adr id: adr-0093 status: accepted created: 2026-06-22 updated: 2026-06-22

ADR-0093 — Collapse the 1:1 authoring personas; the catalog ships only cross-cutting stances

Context

The corpus-skills catalog shipped seven persona-* conditioning stances. But ADR-0064 already folds each stance's substance into the kit work guides (write-spec carries the architect stance, review-output carries refute-by-default, write-audit carries observation-only, write-research the researcher stance, the documentation guide the documentarian stance). So five disciplines had two carriers — the folded form in the guide and a standalone persona — and the substance had in practice drifted into a third copy (the corpus-works dev-skill mirror), out of sync with the catalog.

A deep-research pass (corpus-works specs/corpus-skills/research-personas-as-skills.md) settled the principle. A persona's identity does not systematically improve objective-task performance ([ZHENG-PERSONA]); role framing helps only via the concrete directives it evokes ([KONG-ROLEPLAY]) — directives that already live in the kit guide. For the skeptic specifically, the lever is external grounding, not the critical attitude ([SELFCORRECT]; corroborated by Huang et al. arXiv 2310.01798 and CRITIC arXiv 2305.11738, 3-vote-verified in the research note). And more simultaneous, partially-redundant instructions degrade adherence (arXiv 2509.21051, 2307.03172 — see the research note). So a standalone stance earns its keep only when it is genuinely cross-cutting (reused across several guides); a stance that maps 1:1 to one work guide is a redundant second carrier whose only reliable effect is drift.

Decision

1. Collapse the four 1:1 authoring personas. persona-architect, persona-auditor, persona-researcher, persona-documentarian are removed from the catalog. Each discipline keeps its single canonical carrier — the folded form in its work guide: architect→write-spec, auditor→write-audit, researcher→write-research (the kit); documentarian→write-documentation (this catalog's code-depth guide). No substance is lost; the redundant standalone copy is.
2. The catalog ships only cross-cutting stances. persona-skeptic, persona-challenger, persona-surveyor stay standalone — each is reused beyond any single guide (skeptic spans review, root-causing, audit-deepening, and self-review; challenger pressure-tests any pre-commit proposal; surveyor's breadth discipline "does not fold cleanly into any single guide", ADR-0064). The empirical-proof evidence discipline (not a persona) is unchanged.
3. The kept stances lead grounding-first. Each opens with its evidence rule (re-run/paste/cite; "three named instances"; "an external referent"), not an identity or attitude line — the value is the directive, not the persona ([SELFCORRECT]).
4. Single source. corpus-skills is the canonical home of the kept stances; the corpus-works dev-skill mirror re-syncs from it. The corpus repo's own persona-documentarian dev-skill is replaced by a pointer to the folded write-documentation discipline.

Alternatives considered

Alternative	Why weaker
Collapse all seven (zero standalone)	surveyor + challenger fold into no guide — removing them loses capability or forces the misfit fold ADR-0064 rejected
Keep all seven (status quo)	leaves 1:1 disciplines in two/three drifting carriers for no reuse benefit; identity-only copy adds no measured value
Measure first, then decide	defensible, but the change rests on strong findings (identity-is-noise; grounding-is-the-lever) + an observed drift hazard; an A/B is recorded as optional post-hoc validation, not a blocker

Consequences

Positive: one carrier per 1:1 discipline (no drift); a small, honest catalog of genuinely cross-cutting postures; downstream references (canon docs, corpus-agents see-alsos, the website) tell one true story. Negative: a one-time cross-repo edit (five repos) and the loss of the "load architect/auditor/researcher/documentarian as a posture without its host guide" affordance — judged unused in practice (the host guide is where that work happens). Neutral: the kit work guides are unchanged in substance.

Status

Accepted. Refines ADR-0042 (conditioning ships as standalone skills — now only for cross-cutting stances) and ADR-0064 (catalog side; the kit-tiering decision is unchanged). Updates the review-stances.md "every stance also ships standalone" convention. Evidence: corpus-works specs/corpus-skills/research-personas-as-skills.md.

Propagation

corpus-skills (remove 4 dirs; reframe 3; README; docs/self-containment), corpus-works (.agents dev subset; research note; board), corpus/.agents (documentarian dev-skill → pointer; SKILLS-MANIFEST), corpus/docs/reference (review-stances, agent-guides), corpus-agents (see-also repointing), corpus-website (/skills page). Sources added to docs/research/sources.md: ZHENG-PERSONA, KONG-ROLEPLAY (the grounding claim reuses the existing SELFCORRECT entry); the fuller verified citation list lives in the research note.