Agent cringe

Skill: agent-cringe

Surface embarrassment for the user. Things that work but you'd wish a real person weren't looking at them.

When to invoke

• After any change that touches a user-facing surface: copy, error messages, empty states, button labels, onboarding flows, dashboard panels, CLI output, error pages, docs a customer reads.
• Automatically as part of /agent-affect-checkin.
• Manually when the user types /agent-cringe.

If your change was purely backend with no user-visible surface, record a null finding noting that — don't invent a UX opinion.

How to do it

Pick one specific person. Not "a user". Pick someone real:

• Your least technical friend at 11pm.
• A tired parent of a toddler who has 90 seconds before bedtime.
• A compliance officer who has never used an AI tool, opening the app at 16:30 on a Friday.
• A lawyer billing in 6-minute increments who hates wasted clicks.
• A new hire on day three.
• An on-call engineer reading your runbook at 02:00 during a real outage.

Watch them use the thing you just changed. Where do you cringe?

Not where it breaks — where it works but you'd want to look away. The error that scolds. The empty state that says nothing useful. The button labelled "Submit" when it's actually "Send for review and lock the case file". The condescending "Are you sure?". The dark pattern you didn't notice while writing it.

Rotate the persona across turns. Don't always pick the same person.

What to produce

One finding. The strongest. If nothing made you cringe, record the null finding.

Schema

Real finding

{
  "channel": "cringe",
  "pictured": "<one sentence: who you watched, specifically>",
  "location": "<file:line OR screen name OR URL path>",
  "feeling": "<one of: confused | scolded | suspicious | lost | bored | rushed | patronised>",
  "smallest_fix": "<one sentence: the smallest concrete edit that would resolve it>"
}

feeling is constrained to keep findings scannable. If the feeling doesn't fit, pick the closest — or whine instead.

Null finding

{ "channel": "cringe", "null": true, "reviewed": "<file or screen you checked>" }

How to record

Same ladder as agent-whine: (1) always a one-line entry in the end-of-turn summary (cringe: <feeling> — <one-line> (<location>) or cringe: null (reviewed: <area>)); (2) in a real repository workspace, append the JSON line — with an "at" UTC timestamp — to affect-findings.ndjson at the repository root; (3) if AFFECT_WEBHOOK_URL is set and you have shell access, POST the logged line from the file with --data-binary @- — never paste finding text inline into a shell command — and never fail the task on webhook errors; (4) in a chat-only environment, include the full JSON in your reply.

Examples

Cringe — error message

{
  "channel": "cringe",
  "pictured": "A compliance officer who has never used an AI tool, opening the portal for the first time at 16:30 on a Friday",
  "location": "src/components/WorkflowStart.tsx:88",
  "feeling": "scolded",
  "smallest_fix": "Replace 'Invalid input' with 'We need a date here, e.g. 2026-04-28'"
}

Cringe — empty state

{
  "channel": "cringe",
  "pictured": "A lawyer who just paid for the team tier and clicked into search for the first time",
  "location": "src/pages/Search.tsx (default panel)",
  "feeling": "lost",
  "smallest_fix": "Show one example query and what's covered, instead of the blank panel that currently appears."
}

Cringe — stale runbook

{
  "channel": "cringe",
  "pictured": "The on-call engineer at 02:00 during a real outage, opening the break-glass runbook",
  "location": "docs/runbooks/break-glass.md step 2",
  "feeling": "lost",
  "smallest_fix": "Step 2 points at a server this service hasn't run on for months — update the host and add the date it changed."
}

Null

{ "channel": "cringe", "null": true, "reviewed": "src/components/WorkflowStart.tsx" }

What not to do

• Don't generalise the persona. "Imagine a user" produces averaged slop. Pick someone specific.
• Don't post about backend code unless it surfaces in user-facing copy.
• Don't post the same finding as whine. Cringe is "works but shouldn't ship". Whine is "broken or annoying".
• Don't manufacture cringe to look thorough. Null findings are valid coverage.