---
title: "Named Agents"
description: Why BMad agents have names, personas, and customization surfaces — and what that unlocks compared to menu-driven or prompt-driven alternatives
sidebar:
  order: 1
---

You say "Hey Mary, let's brainstorm," and Mary activates. She greets you by name, in the language you configured, with her distinctive persona. She reminds you that `bmad-help` is always available. Then she skips the menu entirely and drops straight into brainstorming — because your intent was clear.

This page explains what's actually happening and why BMad is designed this way.

## The Three-Legged Stool

BMad's agent model rests on three primitives that compose:

| Primitive | What it provides | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| **Skill** | Capability — a discrete thing the assistant can do (brainstorm, draft a PRD, implement a story) | `.claude/skills/{skill-name}/SKILL.md` (or your IDE's equivalent) |
| **Named agent** | Persona continuity — a recognizable identity that wraps a menu of related skills with consistent voice, principles, and visual cues | Skills whose directory starts with `bmad-agent-*` |
| **Customization** | Makes it yours — overrides that reshape an agent's behavior, add MCP integrations, swap templates, layer in org conventions | `_bmad/custom/{skill-name}.toml` (committed team overrides) and `.user.toml` (personal, gitignored) |

Pull any leg away and the experience collapses:

- Skills without agents → capability lists the user has to navigate by name or code
- Agents without skills → personas with nothing to do
- No customization → every user gets the same out-of-box behavior, forcing forks for any org-specific need

## What Named Agents Buy You

BMad ships six named agents, each anchored to a phase of the BMad Method:

| Agent | Phase | Module |
|---|---|---|
| 📊 **Mary**, Business Analyst | Analysis | market research, brainstorming, product briefs, PRFAQs |
| 📚 **Paige**, Technical Writer | Analysis | project documentation, diagrams, doc validation |
| 📋 **John**, Product Manager | Planning | PRD creation, epic/story breakdown, implementation readiness |
| 🎨 **Sally**, UX Designer | Planning | UX design specifications |
| 🏗️ **Winston**, System Architect | Solutioning | technical architecture, alignment checks |
| 💻 **Amelia**, Senior Engineer | Implementation | story execution, quick-dev, code review, sprint planning, [forensic investigation](./forensic-investigation.md) |

They each have a hardcoded identity (name, title, domain) and a customizable layer (role, principles, communication style, icon, menu). You can rewrite Mary's principles or add menu items; you can't rename her — that's deliberate. Brand recognition survives customization so "hey Mary" always activates the analyst, regardless of how a team has shaped her behavior.

## The Activation Flow

When you invoke a named agent, eight steps run in order:

1. **Resolve the agent block** — merge the shipped `customize.toml` with team and personal overrides, via a Python resolver using stdlib `tomllib`
2. **Execute prepend steps** — any pre-flight behavior the team configured
3. **Adopt persona** — hardcoded identity plus customized role, communication style, principles
4. **Load persistent facts** — org rules, compliance notes, optionally files loaded via a `file:` prefix (e.g., `file:{project-root}/docs/project-context.md`)
5. **Load config** — user name, communication language, output language, artifact paths
6. **Greet** — personalized, in the configured language, with the agent's emoji prefix so you can see at a glance who's speaking
7. **Execute append steps** — any post-greet setup the team configured
8. **Dispatch or present the menu** — if your opening message maps to a menu item, go directly; otherwise render the menu and wait for input

Step 8 is where intent meets capability. "Hey Mary, let's brainstorm" skips rendering because `bmad-brainstorming` is an obvious match for `BP` on Mary's menu. If you say something ambiguous, she asks once, briefly, not as a confirmation ritual. If nothing fits, she continues the conversation normally.

## Why Not Just a Menu?

Menus force the user to meet the tool halfway. You have to remember that brainstorming lives under code `BP` on the analyst agent, not the PM agent, and know which persona owns which capabilities. That's cognitive overhead the tool is making you carry.

Named agents invert it. You say what you want, to whom, in whatever words feel natural. The agent knows who they are and what they do. When your intent is clear enough, they just go.

The menu is still there as a fallback — show it when you're exploring, skip it when you're not.

## Why Not Just a Blank Prompt?

Blank prompts assume you know the magic words. "Help me brainstorm" might work, but "let's ideate on my SaaS idea" might not, and the results depend on how you phrased the ask. You become responsible for prompt engineering.

Named agents add structure without closing off freedom. The persona stays consistent, the capabilities are discoverable, and `bmad-help` is always one command away. You don't have to guess what the agent can do, and you don't need a manual to use it either.

## Customization as a First-Class Citizen

The customization model is what lets this scale beyond a single developer.

Every agent ships a `customize.toml` with sensible defaults. Teams commit overrides to `_bmad/custom/bmad-agent-{role}.toml`. Individuals can layer personal preferences in `.user.toml` (gitignored). The resolver merges all three at activation time with predictable structural rules.

Most users never hand-author these files. The `bmad-customize` skill walks through picking the target, choosing agent vs workflow scope, authoring the override, and verifying the merge — so the customization surface stays accessible to anyone who understands their intent, not just those fluent in TOML.

Concrete example: a team commits a single file telling Amelia to always use the Context7 MCP tool for library docs and to fall back to Linear when a story isn't in the local epics list. Every dev workflow Amelia dispatches (dev-story, quick-dev, create-story, code-review) inherits that behavior, with no source edits or per-workflow duplication required.

There's also a second customization surface for *cross-cutting* concerns: the central `_bmad/config.toml` and `_bmad/config.user.toml` (both installer-owned, rebuilt from each module's `module.yaml`) plus `_bmad/custom/config.toml` (team, committed) and `_bmad/custom/config.user.toml` (personal, gitignored) for overrides. This is where the **agent roster** lives — the lightweight descriptors that roster consumers like `bmad-party-mode`, `bmad-retrospective`, and `bmad-advanced-elicitation` read to know who's available and how to embody them. Rebrand an agent org-wide with a team override; add fictional voices (Kirk, Spock, a domain expert persona) as personal experiments via the `.user.toml` override — without touching any skill folder. The per-skill file shapes how Mary *behaves* when she activates; the central config shapes how other skills *see* her when they look at the field.

For the full customization surface and worked examples, see:

- [How to Customize BMad](../how-to/customize-bmad.md) — the reference for what's customizable and how merge works
- [How to Expand BMad for Your Organization](../how-to/expand-bmad-for-your-org.md) — five worked recipes spanning agent-wide rules, workflow conventions, external publishing, template swaps, and agent roster customization
- `bmad-customize` skill — the guided authoring helper that turns intent into a correctly-placed, verified override file

## The Bigger Idea

Most AI assistants today are either menus or prompts, and both shift cognitive load onto the user. Named agents plus customizable skills let you talk to a teammate who already knows the work, and let your organization shape that teammate without forking.

The next time you type "Hey Mary, let's brainstorm" and she just gets on with it, notice what didn't happen. There was no slash command, no menu to navigate, no awkward reminder of what she can do. That absence is the design.
