Personal Brand

The profile is the private truth; the personal brand is the public facet of that truth. It chooses which role and which parts of the career to put forward, on which surfaces, and writes the text people will read there. Every claim comes from the profile; every output is a draft until the user approves it. Visuals (palette, fonts, logo, banners) belong to visual-identity.

Contract

• Input: profile/ and projects/ records, profile/direction.md, existing brand/ records and any live text the user supplies.
• Scope: Positioning, surface strategy and publishable text. Never change facts, never publish.
• Output: brand/positioning.md, brand/surfaces.md (format), text drafts in assets/drafts/copy/<surface>.md, copied to assets/staged/copy/ after approval.

Steps

1. Confirm surfaces. Before any copy, know which public presences the user has or wants. If brand/surfaces.md exists, show its entries (name, status) and ask the user to confirm or correct them. Otherwise ask one short checklist question, for example: "Which of these do you have or want? LinkedIn · GitHub · personal website · X · Bluesky · Credly / Microsoft Learn · Malt or another freelance platform · other". When the request already lists the surfaces, restate them and treat that as the answer. Never guess a surface or a URL from the profile.
2. Positioning. From the records, propose the role to lead with, two or three evidence-backed strengths and the audiences (recruiters, clients, peers). Offer real alternatives when the records support more than one. Save the choice in positioning.md with a short canonical headline and bio.
3. Surfaces record. Write or update surfaces.md: one entry per confirmed surface with why, audience, emphasis and status (active exists or is being created now, planned later, dropped with the reason). Ask for missing URLs; leave them out rather than invent them.
4. Copy. Draft copy only for active surfaces the user confirmed; planned and dropped surfaces get none. Before drafting a surface, read only its reference: LinkedIn, GitHub profile README, personal website, X / Bluesky, Malt / freelance platforms, Credly / Microsoft Learn. The examples there are patterns: fill them from the records, never copy their wording or facts. Reuse the canonical headline and bio; adapt length and emphasis, not facts, and stay within the listed limits.
5. Truth check. Use only claims the records mark user-confirmed or that two sources agree on; mark single-source, conflicting or missing facts inline with [CONFIRM] and ask before staging. Keep each title with its employer and dates. Label goals as goals; leave private doubts, plans and constraints out. A blanket "approve whatever you draft" covers wording, not unverified claims.
6. Hand off. Show the drafts, stage only what the user approves, and say what to paste where. Suggest audit to compare live surfaces with the staged copy, and visual-identity for logo and banners on the same surfaces.

When the workspace has a root README.md index, add a link to each new record under Records and change nothing else there: Setup progress belongs to setup, so report your next steps in the reply.

Done when

• positioning.md names the lead role, strengths and audiences, each traceable to profile records.
• The user confirmed the surface list (or the existing surfaces.md) before any copy was drafted.
• surfaces.md has one entry per confirmed surface with purpose, emphasis, status and a last-reviewed date.
• Each active surface in scope has a draft in assets/drafts/copy/<surface>.md and no other surface has one; staged copy contains only approved text and no unconfirmed claim.
• Nothing was published and no profile record changed.