# The Workflow Ran With Four Personas Instead of Five and Looked Fine

> Source: <https://dev.to/quintetkit/the-workflow-ran-with-four-personas-instead-of-five-and-looked-fine-2cd7>
> Published: 2026-09-14 01:14:16+00:00

I run Claude Code as five separate subagents with different permissions —

architect, coder, reviewer, conflict resolver, UI designer. One of them stopped

loading.

**Nothing said so.** The work still got done, by whoever was left. It got

slower, review got softer, declared scopes stopped being respected. Every one of

those looks like "the model is having a bad day".

The symptom has the shape of *not working well*. The cause was *not being there*.

`.claude/agents/` is skipped silently
Five conditions in the frontmatter, any one of which means the file is not

treated as a subagent:

| Condition | What happens | 
|---|---|
| No `name` | Treated as documentation — a note kept beside your agents | 
| The opening `---` is**not line 1** | Read as having no frontmatter, so documentation again | 
| A `name` starting with`-` , or containing`:` | The whole file is skipped | 
| A `name` but no`description` | Skipped | 
| YAML that does not parse | Nothing is read, file skipped | 

**None of these appear in the session.** The reason goes to the debug log, which

you see with `--debug`, which you are not running when things seem fine.

The second row is the one I hit. I had pasted content into a persona file and

an editor put something above the opening `---`. From then on the file was

prose sitting next to four agents, and Claude distributed its work to them.

`:` is unavailable because it is reserved for plugin-scoped names like

`my-plugin:reviewer`. A leading `-` is out for the same class of reason.

Adding a persona by duplicating an existing one is the obvious move, and

forgetting to change `name` is the obvious mistake.

**Which of two files with the same name loads is not documented.** It is decided

by filesystem read order.

So the same repository can run a **different persona on a different machine**,

and both machines are "working". I do not have a story about being burned by

this one, and I am fairly sure that is luck rather than care.

`claude plugin validate` gets you part of the way

```
claude plugin validate .claude/agents
claude plugin validate ~/.claude/agents
```

It finds frontmatter that **fails to parse.** Two limits worth knowing:

`name`
Which is most of the list above. It is worth running and it is not sufficient.

My coder persona had this:

```
tools: *
```

meaning "this one gets everything". `tools` accepts exact tool names or the

server patterns `mcp__<server>` / `mcp__<server>__*`. **A bare `*` is not among
them**, and an entry resolving to nothing makes Claude Code refuse to launch the

subagent.

The documented way to say "everything" is to **omit the field.**

**Why my own linter could not see that** is written up separately.

[https://quintetkit.github.io/en/articles/blind-spot-from-refusing-to-check.html](https://quintetkit.github.io/en/articles/blind-spot-from-refusing-to-check.html)

The short version is that the rule I wrote to avoid false positives was phrased

as "don't look at the `tools` field".

That one is worse than a missing persona, because `coder` is the one that writes

the code. The other four keep working, so it presents as **the coder being unreliable today.**

Two checks, and I only run them twice: after setup, and after adding or copying

a persona.

```
npx @quintetkit/ccheck        # the five conditions, duplicate names, tools: *
claude --debug                # once, to see what was skipped and why
```

And a habit that is cheaper than either: **count them.** If the configuration

says five personas, the thing you want to confirm is that five loaded — not that

the work is getting done. The work getting done was never the question.

The five conditions and every frontmatter field, in one table:

[https://quintetkit.github.io/en/reference/claude-code-subagent-frontmatter.html](https://quintetkit.github.io/en/reference/claude-code-subagent-frontmatter.html)

I publish the configuration for splitting Claude Code into separate personas —

Architect, Coder, Reviewer, Conflict Resolver — under MIT. Copy it, run

`./setup.sh`, and it works. It does not depend on your tech stack.

[https://github.com/quintetkit/quartet](https://github.com/quintetkit/quartet)

I built one real tool using nothing but this workflow. Every Issue, PR, review

and merge is still there. **The parts that went wrong were not deleted.**

[https://github.com/quintetkit/mdlinkcheck](https://github.com/quintetkit/mdlinkcheck)

The version that adds a UI Designer persona, review criteria, a per-Issue

parallel execution script and a 11-chapter guide is on the

[product page](https://quintetkit.github.io/index.en.html).

The full kit — five personas, the scripts and the complete guide — is available here.