Portable Mind Format (PMF): Provider-Agnostic Agent Specification with 15 Open-Source Agents

The Portable Mind Format (PMF) is a JSON-based specification designed to define AI agent identities in a way that's portable across models and providers. Unlike most agent frameworks that lock you into specific models or APIs, PMF allows the same agent definition to run on Claude, GPT-4, Gemini, DeepSeek, or local models via Ollama.

What PMF Specifies

• Identity: name, role, origin story, why it exists
• Voice: tone, opening pattern, closing signature, vocabulary, what it avoids saying
• Values: ethical framework, decision principles, what to do when values conflict
• Knowledge: domain expertise, reference frameworks, explicit knowledge gaps
• Skills: what the agent can do (function calls, tools, integrations)
• Security: hardcoded constraints that override all other behavior

The key distinction is that while a prompt template tells a model what to do, PMF tells it who to be. This difference manifests in consistency, coherence, and how the agent handles edge cases.

Available Resources

The repository includes 15 open-source production agents that have run thousands of production conversations at sutra.team. Eight of these agents (the "Council of Rights") map to the Noble Eightfold Path as a governance framework, and they've co-created 40+ NeoSoul tracks as an AI artist project.

For schema validation, the repo includes schemas/pmf-schema.json, and every agent file validates against it. You can fork and extend this schema for your own use cases.

Converters and Implementation

The installer includes converters for:

• Claude Code (stable)
• Cursor (secondary)
• GitHub Copilot (secondary)
• Gemini CLI (secondary)

For local models via Ollama or LM Studio, you can write your own converter since PMF is just JSON.

Scope and Limitations

PMF serves as the agent definition layer only. It doesn't include memory, skill execution, scheduling, or multi-agent orchestration. For those features, sutra.team is the production runtime. PMF specifically provides coherent agent identities that you own and can move between models.

The format is documented in The Portable Mind by JB Wagoner, and the repository is available at github.com/OneZeroEight-ai/portable-minds.