Synthetic users (panels, interviews under pressure, walkthroughs)

Before a real user has been interviewed, and again when a prototype or a build exists, this skill puts a panel of personas in front of the product and reports what survives repetition. It samples personas from the material the repository already holds, interviews them about what they did last time and under the pressures the brief describes, walks a named flow through their eyes, runs the whole thing more than once with a fresh panel, and reports only what repeats — barriers, missing cases, contradictions, and the list of what must be confirmed with real people. When real interview notes exist, it runs the same script on the panel and reports where synthetic and real diverge, because the deviation is the finding.

It is a hypothesis generator with a strict label: everything it produces is [SYNTHETIC], and nothing it produces satisfies the Definition of Ready in SDLC.md. A panel is individually believable and collectively wrong until calibrated — so the panel's composition follows the data, and its answers are believed only when they repeat.

Arguments