A family member's hospital stay inspired me to build AI personas of Johannes Brahms and Thomas Mann as conversation companions. This post sets out the five ingredients that make a persona feel real, shows an excerpt from my actual Brahms Instructions document, and explains how anyone — including non-technical users — can produce their own with a ready-to-use prompt.

For many years I have been active in music as well as in software, playing piano or double bass. For a glimpse of this other side of me, I am going to put up some tracks or videos. I have just put a couple of sound files on SoundCloud - ...