Rethink Surveys

A survey is a conversation with a busy person. Design it like one.

This skill packages a framework for designing, critiquing, and operationalizing surveys that capture real intent — not satisficed checkbox approval. Built from the experience of designing the Proxymate muShanghai survey (which surfaced bugs in ~6 hours of testing that a category-checkbox flow would have hidden for weeks).

Tool affordances (read first)

The bundled rethink-survey-mcp-server exposes the skill's deterministic operations as MCP tools, its canonical content as MCP resources, and three framing prompts as slash-prompts. When available, prefer them over reasoning from memory.

• Use MCP tools when the user wants a specific deterministic result: critique_survey for lint, get_template for a use-case starter, design_survey_session for the staged wizard, score_response for a single response, cluster_responses for a batch.
• Reason from skill content when the user wants to understand: debate a principle, discuss trade-offs, explain why hypotheticals fail, or do anything not exposed as a tool (e.g. /turn-into-app codegen).
• Fetch resources for grounding instead of paraphrasing: rethink://principles, rethink://principles/{id}, rethink://structure/4-part, rethink://question-library/{part}, rethink://use-case/{event|founder|gig}, rethink://scoring/rubrics, rethink://modality/decision-tree, rethink://anti-patterns.
• Slash-prompts the user may invoke: /jarrett-review (Caroline Jarrett-style review), /design-coaching (Socratic design questions), /mom-test-check (Rob Fitzpatrick founder-discovery lint).

If the MCP server isn't connected, all of the below still works from this skill's reference files. For details on tool inputs/outputs, fallback rules, and prompt framing, read references/mcp-integration.md.

Three operating modes (commands)