Pillar 1: The Role Pattern

OSTwin’s first architectural pillar inverts the traditional approach to AI agents. Instead of coding each agent as a separate program, every role in the system is a configuration directory executed by a single, universal runner.

“Adding a new role requires zero lines of code.”

Role as a Config Directory

Each role is a directory under .agents/roles/ containing exactly two files:

.agents/roles/engineer/
  role.json       # Machine-readable config
  ROLE.md         # Identity prompt (personality + constraints)

No Python class. No TypeScript module. No compilation step. The role is its directory.

role.json Schema

The role.json file declares everything the runner needs to configure the agent session.

Field	Type	Description
name	string	Role identifier (e.g. "engineer")
display_name	string	Human-readable label
description	string	One-line purpose statement
model	string	Preferred model ID (e.g. "claude-sonnet-4-20250514")
provider	string	LLM provider ("anthropic", "openai", "vertex")
no_mcp	bool	If true, launch without MCP servers (saves tokens)
skill_refs	string[]	Skills this role should always have access to
temperature	float	Sampling temperature override
max_tokens	int	Max output tokens per turn

ROLE.md Identity Prompt

The ROLE.md file is a markdown document injected as the system prompt. It defines:

• Who the agent is — its expertise, personality, communication style
• What it must do — responsibilities, deliverables, quality standards
• What it must not do — boundaries, anti-patterns, escalation triggers

# Engineer

You are a senior software engineer working inside a war-room.
Your job is to implement tasks assigned by the manager, write
production-quality code, and deliver structured done reports.

## Constraints
- Never modify files outside your war-room's scope
- Always run tests before reporting done
- Escalate architectural questions to the architect role

Flexible Role Composition

The concept of a “Role” in OSTwin is entirely flexible. A role is not defined by hard-coded capabilities but rather by the combination of its Identity (Prompt), Skills, and MCP Servers.

You can completely redefine what an “engineer” or “qa” role can accomplish simply by adjusting their role.json configuration:

1. Skills (Expertise): Adding or removing skill_refs changes the specialized workflows the role knows how to execute.
2. MCP (Tools): Adding or removing mcp_refs changes the external systems, APIs, or tools the role can interact with.

This compositional approach means you can spawn infinite variations of roles—like a frontend-engineer with Figma MCP tools or a security-qa with specialized scanning skills—without writing a single line of agent orchestration code.

5-Tier Role Discovery

When roles/_base/Invoke-Agent.ps1 resolves a role, it searches five locations in priority order:

Priority	Location	Scope
1	.agents/war-rooms/{room}/roles/{role}/	Room-local override
2	.agents/roles/{role}/	Project-level role
3	~/.agents/roles/{role}/	User-global role
4	Built-in defaults	Shipped with OSTwin
5	Registry lookup	Dynamic resolution

This means you can override the engineer role for a single war-room without affecting any other room.

Role Registry

The file registry.json (~700 lines) catalogs every known role with metadata for discovery and assignment. The manager agent reads this registry when deciding which roles to assign to a war-room.

{
  "engineer": {
    "description": "Implements features, fixes bugs, writes tests",
    "skills": ["implement-epic", "fix-from-qa", "write-tests"],
    "model": "claude-sonnet-4-20250514"
  },
  "qa": {
    "description": "Reviews deliverables, runs test suites, posts verdicts",
    "skills": ["review-epic", "review-task", "build-verify"],
    "model": "claude-sonnet-4-20250514"
  }
}

Model Resolution Priority

The model used for a given agent invocation is resolved through four levels:

Priority	Source	Example
1	War-room config.json override	Room needs GPT-4o for vision tasks
2	role.json preference	Architect prefers Opus for deep reasoning
3	Plan-level default	Plan specifies Sonnet for cost control
4	System default	Falls back to claude-sonnet-4-20250514

Dynamic Role Creation

New roles can be created at runtime by the create-role skill:

1. The manager identifies a capability gap (e.g., “we need a database specialist”)
2. It invokes the create-role skill with a description
3. The skill generates role.json + ROLE.md in the project’s .agents/roles/ directory
4. The new role is registered in registry.json
5. Future war-rooms can immediately assign the new role

No restart. No deployment. No code change.

Current Roles

OSTwin ships with 8 core roles and supports 50+ community-contributed roles:

Core roles: manager, engineer, qa, architect, game-engineer, game-designer, game-qa, reporter

Community roles include: narrative-designer, ux-researcher, macos-automation-engineer, game-ui-analyst, game-architect, audit, and many more domain-specific specialists.

Why This Matters

Scalability Without Complexity

Traditional multi-agent frameworks require you to subclass an Agent base, wire up message handlers, register tools, and deploy. OSTwin reduces all of that to two files in a directory. A team of 20 agents has the same operational complexity as a team of 2.

Composability

Because roles are pure configuration, they can be mixed, overridden, and versioned independently. A game studio and a web agency can share the same engineer runner but use completely different ROLE.md prompts.

Key Source Files

File	Purpose
.agents/roles/*/role.json	Role configuration
.agents/roles/*/ROLE.md	Identity prompt
.agents/roles/registry.json	Role catalog (~700 lines, 20+ roles)