Note on Prompt Availability
The .roomodes file referenced in the README is not present in the repository's public file listing (the curl URL in the README has a trailing period that may be a typo). The exact mode definitions and their roleDefinition prompts are not accessible for direct analysis. The following excerpts come from the non-mode components.
Excerpt 1: Perplexity MCP Installer — Agent Interaction Pattern (setup-perplexity-mcp.sh)
#!/bin/bash
set -e
# Function to get OS type
get_os() {
case "$(uname -s)" in
Darwin*) echo "macOS" ;;
Linux*) echo "Linux" ;;
CYGWIN*|MINGW*|MSYS*) echo "Windows" ;;
*) echo "Unknown" ;;
esac
}
# Finds Roo Code config directory across platforms
# Creates or updates mcp_settings.json with 4 Perplexity tools:
# - perplexity_ask (sonar-pro)
# - perplexity_search (enhanced search with metadata)
# - perplexity_research (sonar-deep-research)
# - perplexity_reason (sonar-reasoning-pro)
Script technique: Cross-platform installer with colored terminal output (ANSI codes), prerequisite validation, API key validation, config backup before overwrite, and success/failure feedback. The script is the "prompt" in the sense that it creates the MCP configuration that will be available to AI agents.
Excerpt 2: Custom Modes Visualizer — Redundancy Analysis Feature
The README describes the Smart View as providing:
"Deep editing with cross-mode redundancy analysis"
"Redundancy Analysis: Interactive highlighting of repeated words across modes"
This feature is designed to help prompt engineers identify when the same instructions appear in multiple modes — a quality gate for .roomodes prompt engineering. While no code excerpt is available here, the UI feature itself is a prompting-methodology tool: it surfaces repeated instructions across mode roleDefinition and customInstructions fields.
Excerpt 3: README — Deprecated Researcher Mode Design Philosophy
### **Researcher** by @JamesCherished: Integrates Perplexity for web search and Lynx for
page analysis, enabling autonomous research-augmented software engineering
https://github.com/James-Cherished-Inc/roo-research-mode
* requires : Perplexity pro or Perplexity API
* cost : a few cents per search for Perplexity
--> deprecated, as Roo Code's new integration for MCP (2025) allows for a more
efficient use of Perplexity.
Design insight: The shift from embedded-mode research (Researcher mode with Perplexity and Lynx) to MCP-based research (official Perplexity MCP server) reflects the evolution of the Roo Code ecosystem — functionality that previously required custom mode definitions is now available via the MCP protocol.