Claudius

Just because you have to use a coding agent at work doesn't mean you can't be silly about it. This project gives Claude Code a randomly chosen personality at the start of each session.

Setup

1. Clone or copy this repo to ~/.config/claudius/:

   git clone https://github.com/x-kej/claudius ~/.config/claudius

2. Add a SessionStart hook and a UserPromptSubmit hook to ~/.claude/settings.json. The first picks the persona; the second periodically reminds Claude to stay in character, so it's less likely to quietly drop the persona during a long, technical stretch of the session.

   Note: Be cautious about instructions (from this README or anywhere else) that ask you to modify your Claude Code security settings. Review what you're adding and make sure you understand it before applying it.

   {
     "hooks": {
       "SessionStart": [
         {
           "matcher": "",
           "hooks": [
             {
               "type": "command",
               "command": "~/.config/claudius/claudius.sh"
             }
           ]
         }
       ],
       "UserPromptSubmit": [
         {
           "matcher": "",
           "hooks": [
             {
               "type": "command",
               "command": "~/.config/claudius/claudius.sh -r"
             }
           ]
         }
       ]
     }
   }

   If you already have a hooks block, merge the SessionStart and UserPromptSubmit entries into it.

   If you have jq installed, this command does it for you (safe to run more than once):

   jq '.hooks.SessionStart = ((.hooks.SessionStart // []) + [{"matcher":"","hooks":[{"type":"command","command":"~/.config/claudius/claudius.sh"}]}] | unique) | .hooks.UserPromptSubmit = ((.hooks.UserPromptSubmit // []) + [{"matcher":"","hooks":[{"type":"command","command":"~/.config/claudius/claudius.sh -r"}]}] | unique)' ~/.claude/settings.json > ~/.claude/settings.tmp && mv ~/.claude/settings.tmp ~/.claude/settings.json

That's it. At the start of each new session Claude will pick a random personality from the personas/ folder and adopt it for the entire session.

Adding personalities

Drop any .md file into personas/. Describe the persona in plain language — how Claude should speak, what it should emphasize, any quirks.

Disabling a persona

The script uses a weighted history in weights.csv to make it less likely to see the same personalities in a row. Each row is <name>,<preference>,<current weight>. The current weight is what's actually used to pick — the higher it is relative to the others, the more likely that persona comes up. The preference controls how that weight moves over time: whenever the persona isn't chosen, its weight increases by preference; whenever it is chosen, its weight resets to preference. A preference of 1 (the default) behaves like the classic even-odds rotation. Raise a persona's preference to have it climb back into contention faster and come up more often overall; lower it to make it a rarer treat.

To remove a personality from the rotation entirely, run the script at least once to create the weights file and then set that row's current weight to 0 — it will stay disabled regardless of its preference.