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Project

Behavioral Verification Instrumentation for the Trust Paradox

Stated trust and behavioral trust diverge sharply on Product.ai chat. Users rate verified-truth assistants 4-5/5 on stated trust, then verify 70-93% of consequential claims in a second tool (Google, Reddit, an LLM, a friend) before acting. The Trust Paradox is the single most important consumer-side dynamic on the chat surface, and it is currently invisible to the team. We have no instrument that tells us when, in which categories, on which verdict types, behavioral trust closes — or fails to close. Without this instrument, every chat improvement is a guess and the chat-expert outcome cannot be measured against its real target. The Experiential Delta is undefendable when the product cannot see whether users actually trust its conclusions.
Project Overview
Discipline
user-researcher
Duration
2 weeks
Compensation
Your stated freelance rate
Surface
Consumer experience · Truth Graph · Product.ai
Kernels
consumer-experience · truth-graph · productai
Outcomes
chat-expert · truth-graph
Tier
Consequential
Tooling
Claude Code or Co-work

Why we want this done

This project derives from consumer-experience-kernel A-3 (the Experiential Delta is the only defensible metric — must change purchase outcome) and A-8 (Trust Architects validate what LLMs cannot self-verify). It directly serves the chat-expert outcome (currently at-risk: zero return-rate data, zero conversational-grounding categories). The chat-expert evidence criterion requires recommendation-acceptance ≥25% across 3+ categories; you cannot move that number if you cannot see whether non-acceptance is "user found a better answer elsewhere" or "user accepted but verified externally first." The instrumentation forged here becomes the empirical floor under every Phase 1 axiom decision and every Trust Architect calibration. Without it, the Beige Singularity argument collapses to marketing copy.

Scope

  • productai-web (chat surface): define the events to instrument (verdict shown, user acted, user opened external tab, user copied text, user returned, session ended). Coordinate with the engineer who owns the chat surface (currently Phil Larsen on Mobile, but chat-island lead on web — confirm Day 1).
  • aios/dashboard/: add the Behavioral Verification tile to the chat-expert outcome page. Coordinate with the dashboard architect.
  • aios/outcomes/chat-expert.md: propose evidence-criterion update reflecting the new instrument; route via /outcomes if six-test gate passes after edit.
  • Skincare cohort (Beat 1): ride alongside Elena Madrigal and Tess on the May launch. Embed the instrument in the launch surface, not after.
  • Trust Architects (kernel A-8): the candidate may interview 3-5 Trust Architects to calibrate what "behavioral verification" means at expert depth. Not a 12-interview generic study; targeted oracle separation per the kernel's HxC-as-external-truth-anchor doctrine.

What success looks like

A stranger reads the shipped instrumentation spec, opens the chat-expert outcome dashboard, sees a "Behavioral Verification Rate" tile populated with last-30-days data segmented by category and verdict structure, clicks into a session-level view that shows for each chat session whether the user (a) accepted, (b) accepted-and-verified-elsewhere, (c) rejected, or (d) abandoned — and the latency between those states. The stranger can answer "do users behaviorally trust the chat in skincare versus tech?" without asking anyone on the team. The instrumentation is opt-in and respects the kernel's privacy-first commitment (productai-kernel A-7) — no user data leaves the closed loop. The five-element verdict (kernel A-7) is the unit of measurement; verification correlation is computed against verdict structure, not against UX surface.

The robust solution may surface a better cut: maybe the right unit isn't "verification rate" but "abandonment after-which-second-tool" or "trust-closure latency." The candidate is invited to propose. What is non-negotiable: a working instrument by trial end, a baseline measurement on at least one Beat 1 category, and a written spec the chat team can extend.

References

references.md
Kernels: aios/kernels/consumer-experience-kernel.md (A-3 Experiential Delta, A-5 Calibrated Verdict / Confident No ratio, A-7 five-element verdict, A-8 Trust Architects)
Kernels: aios/kernels/truth-graph-kernel.md (A-7 Glass Box, the 4-tier signal taxonomy, confidence-decay physics)
Kernels: aios/kernels/productai-kernel.md (A-6 Radical Explainability, A-7 Privacy-First Economics, A-9 Knowledge Boundary L1-L4)
Outcome: aios/outcomes/chat-expert.md (currently at-risk — this project unblocks measurement)
Anti-references: "Conduct 8-12 user interviews on trust and present findings" — interview-shaped, no production tie-in, REJECT. "Run 5 usability tests on chat" — generic UX, ignores the verified-truth physics. "Stated-trust survey via Typeform" — captures what users say, which the kernel explicitly mistrusts; the whole problem is the gap between stated and behavioral.
Frontier-practice grounding: axioms/Frontier-Practice-2026/data-science-state-of-practice-2026.md (behavioral analytics, experimentation methodology). axioms/Frontier-Practice-2026/product-management-state-of-practice-2026.md (research methodology + JTBD).
Driver: aios/drivers/operations/recruiting-driver.md §5.1 three-criteria gate.

Constraints

  • Claude Code or Claude Co-work as primary AI substrate (driver §8). Hybrid with Cursor/V0/Figma allowed for any visual surface work.
  • IP boundary: trial contractor team membership only. No aios-methods access — the instrument cannot depend on ARC Autopilot infrastructure.
  • Privacy-first is constitutional (productai-kernel A-7). Any instrumentation proposal that leaks user data outside the closed loop is rejected before review.
  • Two-week duration. Day 1 onsite. Final deliverable: shipped instrument code (or partial code with shippable spec) + spec doc + first measurement on at least one category + written limitations note.
  • The deliverable is NOT a 30-page research report. It is a working instrument and a 3-5 page spec engineers extend from. Report-only output rejected per recruiting-driver §5.1 criterion 1.

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Apply
01

Read the Codex (10 min)

The operating principles we work by. If they resonate, the rest of this will land. Open the Codex →

02

12-minute video screen

Hireflix, async. Questions are calibrated to this project specifically.

03

Chemistry call (30-60 min)

Direct call with the CEO. Strategic alignment and mutual fit. No problem-solving exercise.

04

Project begins within 2-3 weeks

1099 contractor agreement, NDA, paid at your stated rate. Day 1 in Santa Monica.