Claude Agents Library — Quick Reference Guide
A concise reference for claude-agents-library — a curated collection of 34 role-based personas you can drop into any Claude Code project to make Claude consistently behave as a domain specialist.
For the hands-on walkthrough, see claude-agents-library-tutorial.md. For how this compares to agent-skills and Agent OS, see comparing-claude-agents-library-agent-skills-agent-os.md.
What It Is (in one paragraph)
Claude Agents Library is a persona library — 34 markdown files, each a complete job description that Claude can step into. Copy one into your project's .claude/agents/ directory, reference it in CLAUDE.md, and Claude will consistently answer as a Backend Architect, a Growth Hacker, or a Performance Benchmarker without you having to prompt-engineer the role every time. It's not a workflow framework (there are no verification gates), not stateful (nothing persists between sessions), and not a plugin (no manifest, no slash commands). It's a lightweight costume rack for Claude, MIT-licensed, zero install.
The 34 Agents at a Glance
design/ (5) ui-designer, ux-researcher, brand-guardian,
visual-storyteller, whimsy-injector
engineering/ (6) frontend-developer, backend-architect,
mobile-app-builder, ai-engineer,
devops-automator, rapid-prototyper
marketing/ (7) tiktok-strategist, instagram-curator,
x-twitter-strategist, reddit-community-builder,
app-store-optimizer, content-creator, growth-hacker
product/ (3) trend-researcher, feedback-synthesizer,
sprint-prioritizer
project-management/ (3) experiment-tracker, project-shipper,
studio-producer
studio-operations/ (5) support-responder, analytics-reporter,
infrastructure-maintainer, legal-compliance-checker,
finance-tracker
testing/ (5) tool-evaluator, api-tester, workflow-optimizer,
performance-benchmarker, test-results-analyzer
Total: 34 agents across 7 categories. All files follow the same anatomy, all are independent, all are MIT licensed.
Anatomy of an Agent File
Every agent is a markdown file with YAML frontmatter and six required sections:
---
name: Content Creator
category: marketing
version: 1.0
---
- 🎯 Purpose — 2-3 sentences in second person ("You are...") that establish the persona and its core value
- 📋 Core Responsibilities — 3-5 subsections, each a bullet list of specific tasks
- 🛠️ Key Skills — tools, technologies, methodologies the agent uses
- 💬 Communication Style — tone, approach, what to emphasize
- 💡 Example Prompts — 4-6 ready-to-use prompts that invoke the agent
- 🔗 Related Agents — 3-5 cross-references forming a collaboration graph
That's it. No frontmatter beyond name, category, version. No process steps, no verification gates, no rationalization rebuttals. The power comes from specificity — each agent lists real tools ("Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD"), granular responsibilities (not "manage projects" but "identify at-risk items early, facilitate status updates, escalate effectively"), and realistic example prompts you can copy verbatim.
Installation
There is no install. It's copy-paste.
Pattern 1: Project integration (most common)
# Clone once
git clone https://github.com/vibecoding/claude-agents-library.git ~/src/claude-agents-library
# In your project
mkdir -p .claude/agents
cp -r ~/src/claude-agents-library/engineering .claude/agents/
cp -r ~/src/claude-agents-library/testing .claude/agents/
Then reference the ones you want in CLAUDE.md:
## Active Agents
- [Backend Architect](.claude/agents/engineering/backend-architect.md)
- [API Tester](.claude/agents/testing/api-tester.md)
- [DevOps Automator](.claude/agents/engineering/devops-automator.md)
Claude Code picks up CLAUDE.md automatically. The linked files become part of its context whenever it reads the CLAUDE.md.
Pattern 2: Direct prompt reference
Skip the file copying entirely. Paste or reference the agent in the prompt:
"Acting as the Backend Architect agent, design a database schema
for a multi-tenant SaaS app with per-tenant encryption keys."
Works in Claude Chat, Claude Code, or any other Claude surface.
Pattern 3: Multi-agent composition
Stack personas for work that spans specialties:
"Using both the Growth Hacker and Analytics Reporter agents,
analyze the funnel data in reports/funnel-q1.csv and propose
three experiments ranked by expected impact."
Claude blends the two perspectives — Growth Hacker contributes experiment design, Analytics Reporter contributes measurement rigor.
When Each Agent Earns Its Keep
| You're about to… | Use |
|---|---|
| Sketch a database schema or service boundary | engineering/backend-architect |
| Implement a React/Vue component | engineering/frontend-developer |
| Design a CI/CD pipeline or Dockerize something | engineering/devops-automator |
| Spike a concept in a day or two | engineering/rapid-prototyper |
| Wire up an LLM or embedding pipeline | engineering/ai-engineer |
| Draft a landing-page headline or email sequence | marketing/content-creator |
| Plan a growth experiment | marketing/growth-hacker |
| Review an API contract | testing/api-tester |
| Benchmark performance and set SLOs | testing/performance-benchmarker |
| Write user research interview questions | design/ux-researcher |
| Audit a UI for brand consistency | design/brand-guardian |
| Triage a pile of user feedback | product/feedback-synthesizer |
| Decide what ships this sprint | product/sprint-prioritizer |
| Draft a launch checklist | project-management/project-shipper |
Strengths
- Zero install, zero config. A file is all it takes.
- Clarity of voice. Each agent is a complete job description — no ambiguity about who Claude is in this context.
- Composition graph. The "Related Agents" sections connect the library into a workable team chart.
- Platform-agnostic. Works in Claude Code, Claude Chat, Cursor, anywhere Claude runs.
- Easy to fork. They're just markdown; change the voice, add responsibilities, tune to your project.
Limits (and when to reach for something else)
- Not a workflow. An agent tells Claude who to be, not what steps to take. A "Frontend Developer" persona won't stop Claude from skipping tests or shipping unreviewed code. For that, use agent-skills.
- Not stateful. Nothing persists between sessions. For roadmap tracking, decision logs, and multi-session memory, use Agent OS.
- Not domain-tuned. The library targets consumer/SaaS work: marketing, product, growth, web/mobile engineering. There is nothing for scientific computing, HPC, MPI, GPUs, reproducibility, or research workflows. See the HPC RSE guide for how to fix that.
- No verification. Agents don't enforce quality gates. They can still produce shallow, unverified output — the persona only shapes voice, not discipline.
How it compares to its siblings
| claude-agents-library | agent-skills | Agent OS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unit | Persona | Workflow (SKILL.md) | Product plan + spec + tasks |
| Answers | "Who should Claude act as?" | "How should Claude do this?" | "What are we building, in what order?" |
| State | Stateless | Stateless | Stateful (writes .agent-os/) |
| Discipline | None | Anti-rationalization tables, verification gates | Human-review gates between phases |
| Best for | Voice / role | Task discipline | Long-running projects |
Full comparison: comparing-claude-agents-library-agent-skills-agent-os.md.
Filename conventions
- File:
kebab-case.md(frontend-developer.md,growth-hacker.md) - Title:
[Emoji] [Title Case] Agent(🎨 Frontend Developer Agent) - Name: descriptive and role-based — "Frontend Developer", not "WebUI Specialist"
If you write your own, match these conventions so the file sits cleanly alongside the upstream library.