AB synthetic-user-research
Use AI personas for early-stage research signal — with hard guardrails on what synthetic methods can and cannot validate. Use when asked to run synthetic user testing, simulate user reactions with AI personas, pretest a survey or message before fielding it, or decide whether synthetic research is appropriate at all. Produces a fit verdict for the question at hand, a persona-panel design grounded in real data, the findings labelled as synthetic throughout, and the follow-up plan with real humans. Never a substitute for discovery interviews — see discovery-interview-guide and user-research-synthesis for the real thing.
Use AI personas for early-stage research signal — with hard guardrails on what synthetic methods can and cannot validate.
As a process B 70/100 · Nearly there — weak spots: when it triggers, failures and branches, progress reporting
How to improve
- Your own cases (evals/evals.json, 4–6 real requests with expected answers): the full check would then run those instead of a model-drafted suite.
- A spec.yaml with trigger phrases and assertions — a behaviour contract for CI; `skilltest init` writes a template.
Guard findings · 0
✓ No critical or high findings
Files scanned: 1. Evidence is masked. Grey chips explain why severity was lowered.
Against the Agent Skills spec
✓ No remarks against the Agent Skills spec
Process rating: all ten parameters 70/100
- 0Failures and branches. Linear process with no failure handling
- 0Progress reporting. Says nothing while it works
- 20When it triggers. No condition that starts the skill
- 60Result and completion. Output format stated, no completion criterion
- 70Inputs and preconditions. Inputs and preconditions are listed
- 100Tools and files. No external tools needed
- 100Steps. 34 steps
- 100Consistency. Name and required fields are in place
- 100Execution cost. Instruction body is 1434 tokens
- 100Running it twice. No mutating operations
Everything here is measured from the skill text rather than judged by a model, so the numbers are checkable. A parameter weighs more when it is a more common reason for the process to stall.
Quality signals
- +5Description has no quoted example phrases that should trigger the skill
- +4Description does not say when NOT to use the skill (false activations)
- +4No input/output examples
- +1No license
- +2Single-language instructions
- +3Description length 624: enough signal without eating the budget
- +4Structure: 9 headings
- +3Step-by-step instructions: 34 items
- +3Output format is stated explicitly
Quality base 70; lint remarks subtract, signals add up to 100. Result: 83.