| name | human-distill |
| description | Distill a real person into a hireable coworker agent from their source material — chat exports, emails, meeting transcripts, documents, interviews, and live mirroring. Use when the operator wants to clone a colleague, build a coworker from someone's writing, onboard a digital twin, or asks to 'distill', 'clone', or 'mirror' a person. Consent-gated for real humans. |
| user-invocable | true |
| metadata | {"hybridclaw":{"category":"productivity","short_description":"Distill a human into a coworker agent.","tags":["coworker","distillation","persona","cloning","onboarding"],"related_skills":["skill-creator","personality"]}} |
Human Distillation
Turn a person's source material into a working coworker agent: a persona
written into the agent identity files (IDENTITY.md, SOUL.md, USER.md,
CV.md) and a work-module skill (skills/<alias>-playbook/) that carries
their workflows, preferences, and judgment. Every generated claim cites the
corpus documents it came from; nothing is invented beyond the source.
The deterministic engine is the hybridclaw coworker CLI. Your judgment
enters the pipeline through exactly one artefact: extraction.json. You never
edit the persona files directly — the engine renders them from validated
claims so every line stays cited, versioned, and reversible.
Hard rules
- Consent first. Distilling a real, named human requires a recorded
consent artefact. Never run
coworker consent record on your own
initiative or invent a consent statement — the operator must provide the
statement and run (or explicitly dictate) the command. If a run is
blocked, relay the remediation message and stop.
- Evidence or nothing. Every claim in
extraction.json must cite real
corpus document ids from the analysis packet. If you cannot support a
claim, leave it out or put the question in openQuestions. The engine
flags and drops uncited claims — do not try to route around it.
- Never impersonate. The coworker mirrors the subject's judgment, not
their identity. Do not sign as the subject or present generated output as
written by them.
- Privacy. Third-party PII is masked at ingest. If you see unmasked
third-party contact details anywhere in generated output, stop and run
hybridclaw coworker eval --alias <alias> to surface it.
Pipeline
hybridclaw coworker distill --alias <alias> --name "<display name>" \
[--role "<role>"] [--match-alias <name|email>]... --source <path> [...]
Stages run in order, each resumable: ingest → analyse → build → merge → correct. The run record lives at runtime/distill/<run-id>/run.json in the
coworker's agent workspace, with a human-readable REPORT.md beside it.
- Intake. Ask the operator: who is being distilled (display name, role,
relationship), which aliases/emails identify their authorship
(
--match-alias, critical for chat exports), whether they are a real
person (default) or fictional (--fictional), and what source material
exists.
- Consent. For a real person, confirm consent is recorded
(
hybridclaw coworker consent show --alias <alias>). If not, give the
operator the exact consent record command to run and wait.
- Ingest + analyse. Run
coworker distill with the sources. The engine
masks third-party PII, weights quality (authored long-form > chat
one-liners), holds out a slice for eval, and writes an analysis packet.
- Extract. Read
analysis/PACKET.md in the run directory and write
analysis/extraction.json following
references/extraction-contract.md
and the six-dimension model in
references/six-dimensions.md.
- Merge. Resume the run
(
coworker distill --alias <alias> --resume <run-id>). The engine
validates citations, merges claims, writes the persona files and the
work-module skill as versioned edits, and opens review items for any
conflict you declared. Report flagged claims and open reviews to the
operator verbatim from REPORT.md.
- Verify. Run
hybridclaw coworker eval --alias <alias>. A leakage
failure must be reported and fixed before the coworker is used.
Intake modalities
Use every channel of evidence the operator can provide; they compound:
| Modality | How |
|---|
| Chat exports | Slack export dirs/JSON, generic chat JSONL — --kind auto detects them |
| Email | .mbox archives |
| Meetings ("listening") | Speaker-labelled transcripts (Name: text lines) |
| Writing samples | Markdown / text docs, decision records, posts |
| Questionnaire | hybridclaw coworker interview --alias <alias> [--audience subject|colleague] --out <file> generates a gap-driven interview targeting the dimensions with least evidence; the answered file is ingested with --kind interview (highest weight) |
| Mirroring | Live draft-compare-diff sessions per references/mirroring.md; differences become corrections |
After each merge, check openQuestions and dimension coverage in the packet;
offer the operator a fresh interview round for the weakest dimensions.
Incremental updates and corrections
- New material later: same
coworker distill command — only the delta is
re-analysed; standing conclusions are never overwritten. Contradictions
you declare via conflictsWith become review items the operator resolves
with coworker review resolve.
- When the operator corrects the coworker's behaviour in conversation
("she'd never open with a greeting"), persist it immediately:
hybridclaw coworker correct --alias <alias> --note "<correction>".
It becomes a maximum-weight corpus document and is promoted into the
persona on the next run. Then continue with the corrected behaviour in the
current session.
Operating boundaries
- Green: reading sources/corpus/status/reports, generating questionnaires,
writing
extraction.json, coworker status|eval|interview|review list.
- Amber (confirm with the operator first):
coworker distill runs and
resumes (they write workspace files, reversibly), coworker correct,
coworker review resolve, coworker export.
- Red (never): recording or fabricating consent,
coworker forget
(operator-only), editing generated persona/skill files by hand, distilling
someone the operator has not named.
Container note
If hybridclaw is not on PATH (sandboxed container session), do the
file-contract half yourself — read PACKET.md, write extraction.json —
and hand the operator the exact distill --resume command to run locally.
Deeper material
