Agent Personas for github interactions

[FernandoMiguel]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Profile

Body

Many of us are using agents to interact with github under our accounts.
but when an agent comments on a PR, or another bot comment, under our own name it feels very icky, to see our name next to something we didn't write.

I would like to request a new github feature. one that allows the creation of Personas for agents to use, under own identity with scoped privileges.
Something similar to a github app, but dedicated to agents use.

That way those (sub)profiles link back to us owners, but show a different name and avatar. They wont have more privileges than us, and wont be able to bypass rulesets, like approve our own PRs, since the identity is still our own.

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[mohammadrezwankhan]

This is a reasonable gap, and the current App identity model gives a useful boundary for the proposal.

• An installation access token identifies the GitHub App as its bot; a user access token acts on behalf of the user. Those are intentionally different attributions. GitHub Apps also use fine-grained permissions and can be limited to selected repositories. See Differences between GitHub Apps and OAuth apps.
• GitHub’s new agent apps are the closest current building block, but they are a public preview for exposing agents in GitHub workflows, not a general persona switch for every API action.

If GitHub adds personas, I would make each persona a child of an owner rather than an alias that can impersonate the owner:

1. a distinct name/avatar with a visible “owned by” link;
2. its own installation, repository scope, and least-privilege permissions;
3. a clear bot/persona badge on comments, reviews, commits, and approvals;
4. audit events that retain both the owner and persona, including the token type; and
5. per-persona disable/revoke controls, with branch protections still preventing self-review or self-approval.

For now, if each agent needs a genuinely separate visible identity, separate GitHub Apps are the closest safe approximation. Reusing a PAT or user access token makes the action appear as the human, which is exactly the attribution problem this proposal is trying to solve.