Friday, June 20, 2025

AI persona capybara tests

What does it look like when we move from capybara/selenium, scripted, mostly deterministic tests to a fuzzing mindset coupled with ai personas? 

The idea of a user persona as a design tool has existed for some time, but I have rarely found them durable, long term aides beyond "job role" in a BDD context. 

But we have had game "AI" for some time, notably in things like Rimworld where a given persona has agency - it may still be limited, but in any given situation you can rely on it to maximise X or minimise Y.

What does it look like for A/B testing with synthetic personas? What does it look like when your end to end test has an AI agent that is pretending it has the cognition of a 70 year old?

Is there value here?
Or is this, like the hand crafted personas, just fluff?

For the most part - for the deterministic, repeatable results - you don't need AI so much as you just want a set of words with enough weighting.

Picture these basic agents.
The optimist:
Just keeps clicking yes, proceed, next, I agree!
Never fills in a form until an error demands it.
If the text has a positive sentiment, they are on board.

The pessimist:
The inverse of the above 

The cheapskate:
Looks for the second lowest 'price' on a page and focuses on that for purchase.


All seem buildable.

No comments: