User Research Skill

What is User Research Skill?

User Research Skill, from Cookiy AI, is an agent skill that gives coding agents a structured way to run user research. It is described as covering four areas: AI moderated interviews, synthetic user generation, quantitative surveys, and participant recruitment workflows. In practice a skill like this is a set of instructions and procedures the agent loads, so instead of improvising when you ask it to run a study, it follows a defined process for drafting the questions, conducting or simulating the conversation, and organizing what comes back. The project lists compatibility with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and OpenClaw, which means it targets the terminal and editor based agents rather than a standalone research product. It is positioned for product teams without a dedicated researcher who still want research to happen on a regular cadence rather than only before a big launch.

Who is User Research Skill for?

This suits a small product team that knows it should be talking to users and keeps not doing it because the process is heavy. If you already work inside an agent for the rest of your day, having the research procedure available there lowers the activation cost of a study from a project to a prompt. The synthetic user piece is best understood as a rehearsal tool: useful for pressure testing a survey or an interview guide before you spend real participants on it, and not a substitute for talking to people who might actually buy the thing. Treat findings from generated respondents as hypotheses. Anything you plan to act on should be checked against real interviews, and recruiting real participants is still the expensive part.

How does User Research Skill compare?

Marketing Skills addresses what to do once you know the audience, supplying campaign and copy frameworks, while this skill is about learning what the audience thinks in the first place. OSINT Skill also gathers information about people, but from public sources for investigation rather than by asking participants structured questions, so the ethical and methodological ground is completely different. Taste Skill is not a research tool at all; it shapes the quality of what an agent writes, which is useful downstream when you turn findings into copy. The distinctive thing about User Research Skill is that it packages a full method, from recruiting to survey, rather than a single technique, and that breadth is worth checking against your own standards before you rely on it.

Compare with: Marketing Skills, OSINT Skill, Taste Skill

User Research Skill pricing

The catalog records it as free, and the repository is public. A skill is instruction text, so there is no software cost and no account to create. The costs land elsewhere and they are real. AI moderated interviews and synthetic users consume model tokens, and volume grows quickly when you simulate many respondents. Recruiting genuine participants costs money or incentives regardless of tooling, and no skill removes that. Budget for model usage and for the people, not for the skill itself.