synthteam

synthteam (plugin)

A plugin for consulting distilled personas of colleagues — locally, without involving them. Useful for pressure-testing plans, anticipating pushback, or stress-testing decisions through someone else's lens.

Personas are simulations, not the real people. Verify anything load-bearing with the real humans before acting on it.

Skills

The plugin has three skills that split into an ingestion side and a consumption side. distill-slack-persona produces persona docs; ask-colleague and ask-team consume them. Every persona that exists is automatically available to both consuming skills.

distill-slack-persona — build a persona

Turns a colleague's Slack history into a structured persona doc: a natural-language description of what they know, what they believe, and how they decide. It dumps their channel messages with a script, then runs a multi-agent pipeline that distills the raw messages into five facets (strategic priorities, specific opinions, decision-making patterns, domain knowledge, and operational context). The doc captures substance, not voice — no verbatim text, no style mimicry. This is the only skill that writes personas; the others just read them. See how to use it below.

ask-colleague — one person's take

Consults a single distilled persona for their likely take, critique, or pushback on an idea — locally, without involving the real person. Use it to pressure-test a plan, anticipate a reaction, or surface the objection you might dodge by not asking. It answers in first-person as that person would reason, grounded in their persona doc, and flags when it's extrapolating beyond what the doc covers.

Invoke it: ask alex about <idea>, what would alex think of <plan>, or /ask-colleague alex …

ask-team — a panel that deliberates

Convenes a simulated panel of all your personas to deliberate a question together. Each persona becomes its own research agent, forms a position, then reacts to everyone else's positions across multiple rounds until the panel converges. The output maps where the team agrees, where it genuinely splits and why, and what only the real humans can settle. More expensive than ask-colleague (~8–12 subagent runs) — reach for it when one perspective isn't enough.

Invoke it: ask the team about <question>, run this past everyone, or /ask-team …

What it looks like

> ask alex about dropping the offline cache

Alex (Staff Engineer) — likely take:

  I'd push back. We added that cache after the Q3 outage when the
  upstream API flaked for 40 minutes — dropping it reintroduces a
  single point of failure. If the goal is bundle size, I'd argue
  for shrinking the cache, not removing it.

  ⚠ Extrapolating: the persona doc has no signal on the *current*
  reliability numbers — check those with the real Alex.

When to use this

• Reach for ask-colleague to pressure-test a plan, anticipate one person's pushback, or surface the objection you'd dodge by not asking.
• Reach for ask-team when one perspective isn't enough — cross-functional gut-checks, or decisions that genuinely split a team.
• Don't treat persona output as a sign-off. Personas are simulations built from past Slack history; they miss recent context and anything said outside Slack. Verify load-bearing conclusions with the real humans.

Shared data directory

Personas and raw Slack dumps live under ~/.synthteam/ — deliberately outside the plugin so they survive reinstalls and are reachable by whichever skills are installed (override the location with the SYNTHTEAM_HOME env var):

~/.synthteam/
├── assets/<slug>/          # raw Slack dumps — local-only, never committed
│   ├── raw-messages.jsonl
│   └── metadata.json
└── personas/<slug>.md      # the distilled persona docs the ask-* skills read

Repo layout

synthteam/
├── .claude-plugin/
│   └── plugin.json               # plugin manifest
├── .env.example                  # SLACK_USER_TOKEN for the dump script
├── README.md                     # this file
├── COMPLIANCE.md                  # GDPR / works-council / privacy-law notes
└── skills/
    ├── distill-slack-persona/       # ingestion: dump Slack + distill personas
    │   ├── SKILL.md
    │   ├── README.md
    │   ├── package.json          # node deps for the dump script
    │   ├── scripts/              # Slack ingestion
    │   └── references/           # distillation-facets.md — the pipeline spec
    ├── ask-colleague/            # consume: single-persona take
    │   ├── SKILL.md
    │   └── README.md
    └── ask-team/                 # consume: multi-persona deliberation panel
        ├── SKILL.md
        └── README.md

Installation

This repo ships as a plugin marketplace for both Claude Code and Codex. Add the marketplace, then install the plugin from it.

Claude Code

Inside Claude Code, from GitHub: