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Field notes on synthetic research.
Opinionated notes on validity, method and product craft from the system that has to preserve disagreement.
8 notes
Newest first
The Pollyanna problem with synthetic research
Most AI respondents are trained to be agreeable. Useful synthetic research starts when the room is allowed to object.
Jobs before formats
A focus group, a red-team and a prototype test are not the strategy. They are moves inside a job the buyer actually has.
Validity without pretending
Synthetic research should not claim to replace real users. It should make assumptions, risks and next tests visible earlier.
Why we built Sonaloop local-first
No new AI workspace to provision, no Sonaloop token meter, and no respondent PII by default. Local-first is a product choice and a research choice.
Red-team is not negativity
A red-team pass is not the pessimistic person in the room. It is a structured search for the conditions under which the idea fails.
Pricing research is pressure, not preference
Asking what someone likes to pay is weak. Pricing research gets useful when it exposes budget, trust, urgency and perceived risk.
Personas need memory
A persona without memory is a writing style. Memory gives the panel friction, contradiction and a reason to answer differently next time.
What to do after the council disagrees
A skeptical report is only useful if it changes the next move. Here is how to turn objections into product, messaging and research work.
Threads
Follow one question across the archive.
Method
3Practice
3The live inspector: a workspace that moves while you watch
The inspector grows from a viewer into a live, keyboard-first workspace: every recorded event streams into an activity feed as it happens, a runs panel shows which agents are moving, ⌘K jumps to anything you have, ? reveals the whole keyboard layer — and loadable example projects plus a 60-second tour make the first five minutes self-explaining.
Owned-surface actuation & local embeddings
Personas can now drive live surfaces you own — prototypes and declared staging, tightly capped, with an evidence gate before live ever becomes the default — and the embedding layer goes provider-agnostic: OpenAI, local Ollama, or off.
The customer deck: a PPTX master template
The PowerPoint export grows from three generic slide shapes into a full master template — cover, agenda, executive summary, insight, recommendation, risk, quote, voices, stats, chart, comparison, timeline and closing — authored once in the design system, previewable slide by slide, and rendered as native, editable shapes.