Introducing Code-First: Ship identity flows the same way you ship everything else
If you're shipping software these days, there's a good chance an agent is in your development workflow. In fact, 84% of software developers say they use AI to write code, open pull requests, and push to production regularly; that number is only expected to grow. Some teams have gone further: they're designing loops, or recurring systems that direct agents continuously, without a human writing a new prompt at each step.
But if your identity configuration is still stuck in 2020 (or further back, if we're being honest), then it likely lives in a separate system: outside your codebase, version history, the reach of your coding agents, and every loop your team is building.
At scale, the separation between your codebase and your identity configuration is a major operational problem. As your team grows and configurations expand, testing every change becomes its own project. Confidently deploying an update across dozens of templates without breaking anything requires a lot more coordination than any sprint should handle.
When done right, identity verification should serve as foundational infrastructure. So it should behave like infrastructure: versioned, reviewable, and deployable the same way you deploy everything else.
Persona Code-First makes that possible. With Code-First, you can convert your entire Persona organization into a git repository you own, transforming every workflow into code you can read, edit, and deploy with AI.
How Persona Code-First works
By integrating directly into your development environment, Persona Code-First enables your team to debug and ship faster. Here’s how it works:
Clone the Persona git repository. It contains everything you need to edit and deploy your Persona instance. Your full configuration, including flows, templates, prompts, and settings, lives in a structured file format you can version and track. The repository contains configuration only; it never stores any customer data or PII.
Hand it off to your agent. Your team's AI coding tool of choice, whether that's Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or something else, reads the configuration and executes changes. From bulk edits to global updates, your agent handles it the same way it handles the rest of your codebase.
Review, validate, and deploy. Using the same controls you have for every other production push, your agent can check for errors before anything goes live.
With Code-First, your identity configuration becomes a part of how you deploy, not a separate system you maintain alongside it.
How to use Code-First: An example in action
Say your company is launching in a new market. You need a KYC flow configured for local document requirements, conditional branching for different risk levels, and localized prompts in three languages.
But a week before launch, your compliance team flags a regulatory change in document acceptance required for that market. Ordinarily, you would need to manually build the flow, configuration, and localized prompts one by one, coordinate changes across templates, and hope the last-minute edit didn't break anything upstream.
With Code-First, your engineering team calls their coding agent of choice and describes what they need. The agent reads your entire Persona configuration and builds the new flow end-to-end, including the conditional branching, template variations, and localized prompts, in a single pass. When compliance flags the regulatory change, the agent identifies the affected templates, makes the update, and your team reviews the diff before deploying.
Any engineer on your team can build and modify identity flows using the tools they already know, with no expertise in Persona’s flow builder required. Every change, including fast updates made recently, lives in your version history, giving you documentation that you can review and edit.
IDV infrastructure belongs in your codebase
When identity configuration lives in your codebase, it achieves the same speed, auditability, and control as everything else you ship. That’s what we built Code-First to enable. With it, you can:
Use the AI coding tools you already work with. Code-First is AI-native by design. Bring the agent you already use to interface with the Persona command-line interface (CLI) and execute changes across your full configuration in a single pass. For the first time, your coding agent can build and configure identity verification the same way it builds the rest of your product.
Adapt to changing fraud, regulations, and new markets faster. The demands on your identity stack are constantly evolving. And every change requires updates to your identity configuration. Code-First means those updates don't require a separate process or a handoff. Instead, they move through your engineering workflow like everything else.
Build an audit trail into every deployment. Code-First gives you a complete version history of every configuration change, like who changed what, when, and why. That version history also means rolling back a mistaken edit is a standard git operation. For compliance audits, Code-First helps ensure your identity stack is already documented.
Join the early access program
Code-First is available in closed beta. Early access partners will have a direct influence on the Code-First roadmap. We're looking for teams who want to self-manage and audit their Persona configuration from their codebase. If your implementation involves precise, hard-to-find edits or bulk changes across templates and flows, this program is for you.
We built Code-First because we believe this is how AI agents will build on Persona: with the full context to understand what a builder intends and the awareness to balance every configuration choice against the compliance and regulatory complexity that comes with identity.
If Code-First sounds like the right fit for you, talk to your account team about getting involved.