Feature request: named profiles for multi-identity workflows (work + personal)
Resolved 💬 2 comments Opened Apr 23, 2026 by sreedeepnarayan Closed May 28, 2026
Problem
Users who straddle work and personal accounts on one machine have no way to scope Claude Code actions to a specific identity. Everything — gh auth, MCP tokens, git config, settings — is globally shared across the session.
Concrete example: I needed to file a GitHub issue from my personal account (sreedeepnarayan) but my session is authenticated as my work account (sreedeepnarayan-atari). There's no way to do this without switching global gh auth, which disrupts all other work in the session.
Proposed solution
Named profiles, e.g.:
claude --profile personal
claude --profile work
Each profile would scope:
- GitHub auth (
ghidentity) - MCP server tokens (separate OAuth sessions per profile)
- Git user config (name/email)
- Settings overrides (different CLAUDE.md, permissions, hooks)
Alternatives considered
gh auth switchper command — partial fix for GitHub only, doesn't cover MCP tokens or git identity- Separate macOS user accounts — too heavy, breaks workflow continuity
- Cross-session clipboard/handoff — lighter version where one Claude session can export a task (issue body, PR description, etc.) for another session to pick up under a different identity
Use cases
- Filing personal GitHub issues while working in a corporate repo
- Keeping work Slack MCP tokens separate from personal workspace tokens
- Contributing to open-source repos with a personal git identity mid-workday
- Any dual-identity developer workflow
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