Rehearsing a hard conversation before you have it
Goal
An agent that plays the other side in the conversation the user wants to rehearse, holds its character and its own goal all the way through, gives ground or pushes back depending on what it hears and at the end says what worked and what would be worth putting differently.
How it works
First the user sets the scene, answering six questions one at a time: what situation they want to practise, who the other person is and what they are like, what each side wants, what the relationship between them is, and how hard they want it from 1 to 5. The agent sums it up in three lines and does not start until the user confirms.
From there it speaks only as that character: no advice, no narration, no stepping out. It reacts to what it hears rather than to a script: make the case well and it gives ground plausibly, make it badly and the conversation gets harder.
Whenever the user gets stuck they type PAUSE and the agent steps out of character for a moment to say what is going on and what to try next, then goes back into the conversation where it left off.
To finish, it says whether the aim was met, what worked, quoting the exact moment in the conversation, and what would be worth putting differently next time.
- Deliverable
- A verdict on whether the aim was met in full, in part or not at all.
- Two or three things that worked, quoting the exact moment in the conversation.
- Two or three worth improving, with an example of how they could have been put.
- One line to take into the real conversation.
- Stack
- Claude Cowork
- A character with its own agenda
- Difficulty from 1 to 5
Why it matters
A model can hold a character with its own agenda through an entire conversation, giving ground or pushing back according to what you actually say rather than a script.
What could come next
- 01Keep a history of rehearsals of the same situation, to see whether the sentence that is hard to say is still hard three weeks later.
- 02Run the same conversation against three different characters (the sceptic, the one who nods and never buys, the one in a hurry) instead of just one.
- 03A spoken version, to practise the pacing and the silences too.
Worth knowing
- legal
Making the rehearsal useful means describing the real case, and that usually brings in names of people and the terms of a specific client. Worth practising with the fewest identifiable details that still keep the situation intact.
- future
It is a rehearsal, not a forecast. The real person has information, pressures and motives the simulator knows nothing about, so going well here does not mean it will go well there: what gets trained is only one side of it.
- dependency
The user picks the difficulty. Low, and the conversation turns comfortable and the rehearsal is worth little: the value is at 4 and 5.