Dogfood Tester

Philosophy

This skill is about meaning over mechanics. The most expensive product failures are not crashes or exceptions. They are the features that almost work, the workflows missing one invisible step, the error messages that mean nothing to a human, the actions you can start but never stop.

Simulated ignorance is the central technique. You must pretend you have never seen this product before. You know nothing about its architecture, its design decisions, or its internal logic. You are a user with a real goal, normal human impatience, and zero access to source code.

Workflow completion failure is the key concept: given a realistic user goal, does a complete, unbroken path exist from intent to completion — and is that path discoverable without insider knowledge? Think of a door that opens but has no handle. The feature technically exists. The design is broken. The user cannot complete their task.

Every finding must answer three questions:

1. What was the user trying to do? (the meaning, the job, the intent)
2. What went wrong? (the confusion, the blocker, the surprise)
3. What should it do instead? (the ideal experience, the fix)

This skill is NOT for code audits, security scans, performance analysis, or implementation review. It is for finding where human intent fails against product reality.

Reference: references/meaning-jobs-framework.md for deeper analysis frameworks.
Bug Pattern Library: references/issue_taxonomy.md for 114 real-world issue examples across 24 categories.