@researcher-now/persona-mcp

Talk to durable expert personas — Paul Graham, Warren Buffett, and more — grounded in their real, indexed sources and answered with citations.

This is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) stdio server. Add it to Claude Desktop, Cursor, Codex, or any MCP client, and your assistant gains tools to list personas, ask them questions in their own voice, read their profiles, and follow citations back to the original source.

It is a thin HTTP client over the live researcher.now persona API. Nothing runs locally except this small bridge — the personas, their corpora, and the retrieval/grounding all live on researcher.now.

What you get

| Tool | What it does | Cost | | --- | --- | --- | | list_personas | List available personas (name, slug, source count). | Free | | get_persona | Read a persona's profile: about-report + sample sources. | Free | | ask_persona | Ask a persona a question; get a grounded, cited answer. | Paid | | get_source_package | Follow a citation to the full source content. | Free | | list_groups | List persona groups — panels of personas (slug, members, price). | Free | | ask_group | Put one question to a panel; get positions, disagreements, and citations. | Paid |

Install

No install needed — run it on demand with npx:

npx @researcher-now/persona-mcp

Claude Desktop

Add to claude_desktop_config.json (macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "persona": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@researcher-now/persona-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "RESEARCHER_TOKEN": "rk_your_key_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

RESEARCHER_TOKEN is optional (see Auth below). Restart Claude Desktop after editing.

Cursor

Add to ~/.cursor/mcp.json (or a project .cursor/mcp.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "persona": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@researcher-now/persona-mcp"],
      "env": { "RESEARCHER_TOKEN": "rk_your_key_here" }
    }
  }
}

Codex CLI

In ~/.codex/config.toml:

[mcp_servers.persona]
command = "npx"
args = ["-y", "@researcher-now/persona-mcp"]
env = { RESEARCHER_TOKEN = "rk_your_key_here" }

Auth

Listing personas/groups and reading profiles/sources is free. Asking a persona (ask_persona) or a group (ask_group) is a paid consult. There are two ways to pay:

1. rk_ API key (recommended). Get a funded key at researcher.now/account/?setup=agent and set it as the RESEARCHER_TOKEN environment variable in your MCP client config. The server sends it as Authorization: Bearer rk_....

2. Keyless wallet (x402 / MPP). If no RESEARCHER_TOKEN is set, a paid consult returns HTTP 402 with a payment challenge. This package does not sign wallet payments itself — instead it surfaces a clear message telling you to either configure an rk_ key or use a wallet-enabled client. If the server ever returns a durable agent key (X-Researcher-Agent-Key header), this package caches it at ~/.researcher-now/agent-key and reuses it automatically.

Environment variables

| Var | Default | Purpose | | --- | --- | --- | | RESEARCHER_TOKEN | (none) | Your rk_ API key. Optional. | | RESEARCHER_BASE_URL | https://researcher.now | Override the API base (testing). |

Pricing

Consults are not free: $0.25 per quick consult and $1.00 per deep consult. deep consults run asynchronously and are polled until they finish (they can take longer than a normal request). Group panels (ask_group) are priced by the group's ready-member count — about $0.25 per member, minimum $1.00; list_groups returns the exact priceUsd and the API's figure is authoritative. All listing/reading tools are free.

Example tool calls

List who's available:

list_personas

Ask Paul Graham a quick question:

ask_persona  persona="paul-graham"  question="How do you tell a great founder from a good one?"  depth="quick"

Ask a hard question deeply, then continue the thread:

ask_persona  persona="Warren Buffett"  question="Walk me through how you'd value a railroad today."  depth="deep"
# → answer includes a sessionId; pass it back to continue:
ask_persona  persona="warren-buffett"  question="And how does that change if rates rise 200bps?"  sessionId="<id>"

Read a profile, then follow a citation:

get_persona  persona="paul-graham"
get_source_package  persona="paul-graham"  sourceId="<sourceId from a citation>"

Put one question to a whole panel:

list_groups
ask_group  group="founders-desk"  question="Is now a good time to raise?"

How it works

Each persona is a durable corpus on researcher.now: the real person's essays, talks, interviews, books, and posts — fetched, transcribed, extracted, and indexed. ask_persona retrieves against that corpus and answers in-voice with citations, so every claim is traceable. This package just exposes those live endpoints as MCP tools.

Learn more at researcher.now.

License

MIT