fromDir — load a persona from disk

Clojure (JVM) + cljgo · package net.clojars.muthuishere/toolnexus · SPEC §7E

Not available in Clojure

There is no agent home in this port, so there is nothing to load one from. What it does read off disk is a skills directory — toolnexus.skill/load-skills globs **/SKILL.md — and that is the whole filesystem-to-capability path here.

Point at an agent home directory and get a configured agent back.

fromDir is the one-call form of §7E: a path in, a fully configured agent out — prompt, skills, memory and model all resolved from the directory’s layout. It exists so an operator can add a persona by creating a folder, with no deploy.

What to use instead

Skills already work exactly that way, and they are the part of a persona that actually needs discovery. A directory of SKILL.md files becomes a catalog with no code change:

(require '[toolnexus.core :as core]
         '[toolnexus.client :as client]
         '[koine.fs :as fs]
         '[koine.json :as json])

(defn load-persona
  "Everything this port can resolve from a directory: skills by discovery,
   the prompt by convention, the model from your own config."
  [home]
  (let [tk  (core/build {:skills (str home "/skills")})
        cfg (if (fs/exists? (str home "/agent.json"))
              (json/read-str (fs/read-file (str home "/agent.json")))
              {})]
    {:toolkit tk
     :client  (client/create-client
                {:base-url      (or (:base-url cfg) "https://api.anthropic.com")
                 :style         (or (:style cfg) "anthropic")
                 :model         (or (:model cfg) "claude-sonnet-4-6")
                 :max-turns     (or (:max-turns cfg) 10)
                 :system-prompt (when (fs/exists? (str home "/IDENTITY.md"))
                                  (fs/read-file (str home "/IDENTITY.md")))})}))

(let [{:keys [client toolkit]} (load-persona "agents/researcher")]
  (client/run client "what changed this week?" {:toolkit toolkit}))

Three things make this less than fromDir. There is no agreed directory layout, so IDENTITY.md and agent.json are your conventions and will not match another port’s. There is no memory the agent writes back to. And a missing skills root is only a warning — load-skills contributes nothing and carries on, so a typo in the path yields a persona with no capabilities rather than an error.

If the discovery you want is skills rather than a whole persona, the port has more than a directory glob: toolnexus.core/build takes :skill-defs for skills supplied as data, :skill-provider for a function that produces them at build time, and :skills-filter to narrow the catalog per agent. A persona registry backed by a database rather than a filesystem is a :skill-provider, not a directory walk.

See also

• toolnexus.skill/load-skills — the directory discovery that does ship
• skills / load-with — skills as data, a provider fn, and per-agent filters
• toolnexus.client/create-client — the model and prompt half
• persona / compose-soul — the prompt assembly this would perform