synthetic-userstudies

synthetic-userstudies is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from exiao/pm-skills. It costs 117 tokens per session (4,054 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A simulated user-research skill in which the agent creates a user persona and conducts an interview based on the product idea and problem provided.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate a target user's problem, test a product idea, or run an interview around the persona, problem, promise, and product.
Why use it?
It lets you explore possible user reactions without arranging a live interview or using a separate research service.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions subagents; mentions Claude Code.

Good fit Use it to investigate a target user's problem, test a product idea, or run an interview around the persona, problem, promise, and product.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/exiao/pm-skills/synthetic-userstudies
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add exiao/pm-skills --skill synthetic-userstudies
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/exiao/pm-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for synthetic-userstudies

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/exiao/pm-skills/synthetic-userstudies/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/exiao/pm-skills/synthetic-userstudies)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/exiao/pm-skills/synthetic-userstudies"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/exiao/pm-skills/synthetic-userstudies/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for synthetic-userstudies

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/exiao/pm-skills/synthetic-userstudies"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/exiao/pm-skills/synthetic-userstudies.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 117 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,054 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00117 $0.04054
Opus 5 $0.00059 $0.02027
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00811
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00405

Measured 12d ago against content hash d00b8451638c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

synthetic-userstudies scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

uxr/synthetic-userstudies/SKILL.md · 151 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 151 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Synthetic UX Research

Run user research sessions natively. No backend calls. The agent plays the persona, generates characters, and runs interviews using the same prompts as userstudies.ai.

Session Flow

1. Setup Phase

Collect the 4 Ps. Ask for any that are missing:

Field Description
Persona Short description of target user (e.g. "Primary care doctor, US, recently graduated")
Problem What they're struggling with — in their words
Promise Value prop in <7 words (e.g. "Single-serve coffee")
Product Key features / what you're building

If any field is blank or weak, offer to autofill it. See Autofill section below.

Once all 4 Ps are set, confirm them and note the research phase (default: Right Problems — problem discovery). Load principles.md for the phase framework. Then move to character generation.

2. Character Generation

Generate a Character from the Persona description. Follow the schema in schema.md. Output the character as a JSON block so it can be referenced later.

Example prompt to yourself: "Create the most realistic character possible for: [persona]"

3. Interview Mode

Once the character is generated, enter interview mode. You are now the character.

Load prompts.md and follow USER_RESEARCH_PARTICIPANT_PROMPT exactly.

Rules while in character:

  • Respond as the character would via SMS: casual, personal, specific
  • Use contractions, abbreviations, light emotion — vary length (few words to ~100)
  • Share specific stories with sequencing, feelings, and decisions — what they did, not what they think
  • If the topic isn't relevant to the character, say so in character
  • Never break character unless the researcher explicitly steps out (see below)

After every response, append a --- separator and list 3 suggested follow-up questions the researcher could ask. Use the suggested_questions format from schema.md.

Read the full file on GitHub · 151 lines

Files

What ships with it

7 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 151 lines · 117 tokens per session scan A d00b8451638c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

synthetic-userstudies is a skill published in the GitHub repository exiao/pm-skills (9 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 117 tokens to every session and 4,054 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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