Persona Improvement

persona-improvement

The persona analog of skill-improvement-pipeline: feed a persona a sample of recent corrections/failures where its review lens should have caught something and didn't, and tighten its Unique Questions so the lens fires next time. Access ergonomics, not new capability — it only sharpens an existing persona, never creates one.

When to use

• The user explicitly says "improve / refine this persona" or "the lens keeps missing X".
• A correction sample exists (review misses, repeated feedback) that a persona's questions should have surfaced.

Do NOT use for:

• Creating a new persona (that is persona-governance + the authoring flow).
• Editing a persona's identity/scope (a breaking change → new id per persona-governance).
• A one-off miss with no pattern — one anecdote is not a refinement signal.

Procedure

1. Gather the correction sample. Collect the recent misses/corrections tied to this persona's domain (from the conversation, feedback notes, or a review log). If fewer than ~3 distinct misses, STOP — no pattern yet; say so.
2. Locate the gap. For each miss, name the question the persona should have asked that would have surfaced it. Cluster the misses into ≤ 2 recurring gaps.
3. Propose tightened Unique Questions. Rewrite or add questions that close the gaps — concrete and answerable-from-the-diff, not vague ("does this add a second branch on the same enum?" beats "is the design good?"). Keep the section ≥ 3 questions (persona-governance schema floor).
4. Governance gate (mandatory). Before writing, confirm with persona-governance: the edit is a same-id refinement (not a scope/identity change — those need a new id); the persona keeps ≥ 1 skill citation; the file still passes the skill linter (tier/wing/section/line budget). A scope change is out of scope for this loop.
5. Apply + verify. Edit only the Unique Questions section; run ./scripts-run src/scripts/skill_linter on the persona file and confirm 0 errors; show the before/after questions.

Output format

1. Correction sample — the ≥ 3 misses, one line each.
2. Gaps — the ≤ 2 recurring gaps the misses cluster into.
3. Before/after Unique Questions — the diff, with which gap each new question closes.
4. Governance confirmation — same-id refinement ✅, ≥ 1 citation intact ✅, linter 0-error ✅.

Gotcha

• The most common misuse is scope creep disguised as refinement: adding questions that widen the persona into a second domain. That is a new persona (per the per-domain cap), not a refinement — STOP and route to persona-governance, do not grow the lens sideways.

Do NOT

• Do NOT refine on a single miss — a pattern needs ≥ 3.
• Do NOT touch identity, scope, tier, or wing — same-id Unique Questions only; anything else is a new-id change under persona-governance.
• Do NOT drop below 3 Unique Questions (schema floor).
• Do NOT commit or push — apply the edit locally, surface the diff.

Related Skills

• skill-improvement-pipeline — the skill-side analog this mirrors.
• persona-governance — the four discipline checks this loop is gated by.