Distill slack persona

Skill nickwinder/synthteam/skills/distill-slack-persona

Build or refresh a distilled persona doc for a colleague from their Slack history — dump their channel messages, then run a multi-agent distillation into a structured persona file that the ask-colleague and ask-team skills consume. Use when the user wants to "dump <name>'s Slack", "distill <name>'s persona", "build a persona for <name>", "add <name> as a colleague", "refresh <name>'s persona", or otherwise create/update the source files behind ask-colleague. This is the ingestion-side skill; ask-colleague and ask-team only read what this produces.From its SKILL.md

Install

npx -y skills add nickwinder/synthteam --skill distill-slack-persona

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One thing to look at

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SKILL.md

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Slack Distillation

Turn a colleague's Slack history into a distilled persona doc — a natural-language description of what they know, what they believe, and how they decide. The persona docs produced here are the sole input to the ask-colleague and ask-team skills.

A persona doc captures substance, not voice. No verbatim message text, no tone/style mimicry — patterns and positions only.

Shared data directory

Everything lives under ~/.synthteam/ (override with the SYNTHTEAM_HOME env var). This directory is intentionally outside any skill folder so personas and raw dumps survive plugin reinstalls and stay reachable by whichever ask-* skills are installed:

~/.synthteam/
├── assets/<slug>/          # raw Slack dumps — local-only, never commit
│   ├── raw-messages.jsonl
│   └── metadata.json
└── personas/<slug>.md      # the distilled persona doc — the deliverable

<slug> is the colleague's lowercase first name (e.g. alex).

The workflow has three steps

Step 1 is mechanical (a script). Step 2 is the agent-driven distillation. Step 3 is human review. Do them in order — distillation needs the dump, review needs the doc.

Step 1 — Dump their Slack messages

The dump script lives in this skill at scripts/dump-user-messages.js. It needs SLACK_USER_TOKEN in a .env file (see the repo .env.example; loadEnv walks up from the cwd to find it).

First install its runtime deps once:

cd <this-skill>/  &&  npm install

Then run the dump:

node scripts/dump-user-messages.js <slug> [--months=12]

The script resolves <slug> to a Slack user, runs search.messages with from:@<username> over the time window, expands every thread the user touched, and writes raw-messages.jsonl + metadata.json into ~/.synthteam/assets/<slug>/. DMs and multi-person DMs are excluded by design — personas are grounded in public/channel conversation only. It only reads what the authenticating token can already see.

Step 2 — Distill the persona

references/distillation-facets.md is the full operational spec for this step — the multi-agent pipeline, the five facet definitions, the persona doc format, and the quality checks. Read it in full before starting; it is the authority for everything below.

In short: the current session is the orchestrator. It splits raw-messages.jsonl into chunks, fans out worker subagents to extract per-facet findings, runs one reducer subagent per facet to synthesize sections, optionally runs a critic pass, then assembles ~/.synthteam/personas/<slug>.md with frontmatter and the fixed five-facet structure. The pipeline follows the ed3d-basic-agents:doing-a-simple-two-stage-fanout pattern.

Do not improvise the persona from general knowledge of the company or the person — every claim in the doc must be defensible from the dump.

Step 3 — Review the diff

Read the finished ~/.synthteam/personas/<slug>.md before relying on it. Spot-check a few claims against raw-messages.jsonl. If a section feels uncanny — putting words in their mouth that aren't grounded — re-run that facet or trim it. Run the verbatim-leak sweep described in the facets spec: any distinctive 4–6-word substring shared between the persona doc and the raw JSONL is a leak and must be rewritten in indirect prose.

Refreshing an existing persona

Same three steps. The dump script overwrites raw-messages.jsonl (the time window slides forward). The distillation rewrites the persona doc from scratch. Diff against the previous version to see what changed. Monthly is a reasonable cadence.

Privacy

Raw Slack data stays local. ~/.synthteam/assets/ should never be committed to a repo. Verbatim message text never belongs in the persona doc.
Persona docs describe what someone believes and how they decide. Even paraphrased, that is sensitive. Treat ~/.synthteam/personas/ as private notes about colleagues. Before adding anyone, consider whether they'd be comfortable with the persona existing.
The dump script cannot exceed the Slack access the user's token already has, and excludes DMs entirely.

Limitations

Slack search.messages is user-token only and capped at ~10,000 results per query. A highly active person may hit the cap; the script reports if it did.
Only public channels and conversations the token's user belongs to are searchable.
Voice / style mimicry is explicitly out of scope. The persona doc captures substance, not phrasing.