Persona skill: can’t update + disable auto-update option

[AggManik]

current behavior

• user cannot update the Persona skill. changes do not persist / update fails.

expected behavior

• user can update the Persona skill and saved changes persist.

product improvement

• add a setting to disable auto-updating of the Persona skill document (manual updates only).

[voarsh2]

I dug into this more on a 0.7.0 self-host upgrade, and I think there are actually two separate problems mixed together here.

1. Intentional product change / UX confusion

Persona appears to have been moved from a normal memory document into a default skill.

Git history seems to support that:

• 34ffb228 — feat: make persona as skill
• 66c64408 — fix: don't expose skill documents in api.v1.documents.*
• db0ec324 — earlier persona-v2 migration/fallback work

That means the “Persona vanished from Memory → Documents” symptom can happen even when the Persona row still exists, because:

• Persona is now stored as type = "skill"
• Memory Documents excludes type="skill" by default

So part of the confusion here is just that Persona moved worlds.

2. Actual bug: Persona regeneration appears to clobber Persona skill metadata

The more concerning issue is that persona regeneration still writes back through savePersonaDocument() in:

• apps/webapp/app/jobs/spaces/utils.ts

That save path appears to overwrite metadata with only:

• generatedAt
• version

After the Persona-as-skill change, that means regenerated Persona rows can lose default-skill metadata such as:

• skillType: "persona"
• shortDescription

In my DB, the Persona row still exists and is being updated, but it looks like this:

• title = Persona
• source = persona-v2
• type = skill
• metadata.skillType = NULL

while the other default skills still retain proper metadata.

Migration / repair gap

There also seems to be a repair gap:

• the default-skills migration only runs for workspaces missing the defaultSkillsV1Seeded workspace metadata flag
• once a workspace is marked migrated, it won’t repair a Persona row whose metadata gets clobbered later

So from my perspective there are really two issues:

1. Product/UX issue
   Persona auto-regeneration now conflicts with manual ownership, and Persona has effectively moved from Memory Documents into Skills

2. Bug
   Persona regeneration appears to clobber Persona skill metadata, and already-migrated workspaces may never be repaired afterward

That likely explains at least some of the “Persona is weird / missing / inconsistent” behavior people are seeing in 0.7.x.