Tones

A tone is a bundle of three prompts (see Customizable Prompts for the full mechanics) that together shape how the AI drafts a reply. Patera ships seven built-in tones, lets you create up to five custom ones and adds a Random meta-tone that rolls one of the others per reply.

The seven built-in tones

Engagement Farmer

Built for replies that pull engagement on fast-moving threads. The prompts are heavily constrained against words and patterns that mark a reply as AI-written: overused softeners, filler, mid-paragraph "but" pivots, the usual LLM tic vocabulary. One casual-slang phrase is allowed per reply; more than that gets cut.

Use this for crypto reply-guying, hot-take threads; any context where impressions per character matter.

Professional

Neutral, fact-forward, no emoji, no hashtags. Good for press accounts, B2B threads, public statements; any reply where being taken seriously counts for more than getting a laugh.

Casual

Conversational, DM-like. Light slang is fine, contractions are encouraged, lowercase is common. Reads like a person, not a brand.

Witty

Wordplay, unexpected angles, observational humour. Avoids punching down and cheap formulas. Skews funny rather than just clever.

Support

Validating, empathetic, practical. Good for replying to launches, milestones, vulnerable posts; anything where you want to read as a real ally rather than a hype account.

Bait Question

Mild-controversy opener that ends in a question designed to provoke a reaction. Good when you want the parent author or the wider thread to engage rather than just nod.

Glazer

Sincere praise plus a short on-topic question. Names a specific thing in the parent worth admiring instead of blanket "amazing!" gushing, then invites the author to expand on it. Good for showing genuine appreciation without reading as bot-coded sycophancy.

The Random tone

Below the seven real tones, the tone dropdown has one more entry, marked with a dice icon: Random. It is not a real tone. It has no Hook, Shape or Export prompt of its own. Instead, every time Patera generates a reply, it rolls a weighted pick among the other tones and uses that one tone for that single reply. The next reply rolls again.

Because Random resolves to a concrete tone per generation, the queue row and the toasts show the result, not the word "Random". You will see entries like Random -> Casual or Random -> Glazer, telling you which tone actually drafted that reply.

Weighting the roll

The odds are yours to set. Open the tone settings cog and click the Random cell (it sits in its own column to the right of the real tones). Each tone gets a slider and the percentage next to it is computed from the running total, so raising one weight shifts every share. Two buttons reset the lot:

Fresh installs start on the optimal preset, so Random is useful out of the box without touching a slider. Custom tones join the roll too: they default to a low weight and you can raise them like any other. If you somehow zero out every weight, the roll falls back to a uniform pick rather than locking up.

Custom tones

You can create up to five custom tones of your own. Each one has the same Hook / Shape / Export prompt structure as the built-ins.

A custom tone works exactly like a built-in. The only difference is that built-ins come with prompts already written; custom ones start blank.

Built-ins are editable too

Every built-in tone is fully editable, including Engagement Farmer's 2,000-word constraint specification. You can rewrite any tone's prompts however you like. A Reset to default button on each built-in restores the original prompt if you want it back.

Switching tones

The current tone is shown next to every queued AI Action. Click it to switch. The draft re-generates instantly with the new tone applied.

You can also set a default tone for the whole column. New transfers from Live Feed / Top Performers inherit that default.

Random counts as a valid pick anywhere a real tone does, as the column default or as a single row's tone. Generate works normally when Random is selected; it no longer shows a "No tone selected" block. The row label just reads Random and each generation resolves a concrete tone (see AI Actions for the row controls).

Where customisations live

Tone customisations are saved in your browser's localStorage under the key patera-tones-v1. The Random weights live separately under patera-tone-random-weights. Both are per-browser and are not synced across devices yet, so a tone you build on your laptop will not appear on your phone and your Random weights do not travel with it. Cross-device sync is on the roadmap.