autosearch:perspective-questioning

Perspective Questioning — Multi-Persona Question Generation

Before searching, enumerate 3-6 relevant personas for the research topic and ask each persona "what would you want to know?". The union of those questions becomes the research scope.

STORM originally used this for Wikipedia-style article generation. autosearch uses it to widen the coverage of a query before decomposition / channel selection.

Persona Catalog (starting points)

Runtime AI picks 3-6 from the list that match the query's domain:

• End user — what does it feel like? what's the most common pain point?
• Power user — edge cases, advanced features, integration patterns.
• Maintainer — design tradeoffs, known issues, roadmap.
• Security researcher — attack surface, CVEs, hardening.
• Investor / business analyst — market position, funding, revenue model.
• Regulator / compliance — licensing, data handling, disclosure.
• Competitor — differentiation, feature comparison, pricing.
• New user — onboarding friction, docs clarity.
• Journalist — recent events, controversies, PR statements.
• Academic — published research, theoretical basis, citations.

Output

perspectives:
  - persona: "security researcher"
    rationale: "Query involves a new ML framework; attack surface is non-trivial."
    questions:
      - "What authentication mechanism does X use?"
      - "Are there known CVEs or advisories for X?"
      - "Does X have a security policy and disclosure channel?"
  - persona: "end user"
    rationale: "Users are the primary audience of the final report."
    questions:
      - "What's X's learning curve?"
      - "What are the most-complained-about workflows?"
  # ... 1-4 more personas
union_questions: list[str]   # deduped merge of all persona questions

Usage Policy

• Minimum 3 personas, maximum 6. Fewer than 3 → fall back to decompose-task. More than 6 → cost not justified for most tasks.
• Skip personas whose rationale is weak. Don't force "Journalist" onto a pure code-architecture query just because the catalog has it.
• Do NOT generate persona answers here — this skill only generates the question set. Channel calls + synthesis happen downstream.