Eight behavioral probes. Five business days. One portrait, in 1,200 words.

Each probe asks for a specific moment. None asks "tell us about yourself." All are designed to surface behavior, not self-report.

1. PROBE 01A recent decision that took longer than it should have.Tell us about the decision, what you were weighing, when you knew, and what you did next.
2. PROBE 02A relationship that surprised you by mattering.Who, what you noticed, what you did with the noticing, what they would say about you now.
3. PROBE 03A time you defended something you did not, at the time, fully understand.What you were defending, who you were defending it to, and what you understand now that you did not then.
4. PROBE 04A meeting you left and could not stop replaying.What was said, what you wanted to say, and the gap between the two.
5. PROBE 05The last time you said "yes" to something you wanted to say "no" to.The situation, the yes, what you did with the no you swallowed.
6. PROBE 06A piece of feedback that you have not fully metabolized.From whom, what they said, what you did with it, what it might mean if you finished metabolizing it.
7. PROBE 07A pattern you have noticed in others but not in yourself.What the pattern is, where you see it, and the moment you realized you do it too.
8. PROBE 08The thing you would build if you were not afraid of what it would say about you.What the thing is, what you are afraid it would say, and who you would show it to first.

After you pay, the eight probes are sent one at a time across the days that follow. You can take longer — the only constraint is that the synthesis starts seventy-two hours after the last probe. Most people complete the probes in 8 to 14 days.

Day 1 — Probes 1, 2
Day 2 — Probes 3, 4
Day 3 — Probes 5, 6
Day 4 — Probes 7, 8
Day 5-9 — Synthesis
Day 10 — Delivery

Every portrait is built against a six-section rubric. The rubric is the substrate for the 9.0-out-of-12 quality bar.

1. 01. Core Pattern — the 1-sentence essence of how you operate, named.
2. 02. Signature Moves — the 3-4 specific behaviors you default to across rooms and stakes.
3. 03. Blind Spot — the one thing you cannot see about yourself. This is not flattering by design.
4. 04. Tension — the paradox you live with, named so you can sit inside it on purpose.
5. 05. Growth Edge — the next-step invitation, framed as an experiment, not a directive.
6. 06. Closing Observation — what we noticed. The portrait steps back here.

Every portrait is graded against a 12-point rubric before delivery. The mean across all 20 sample portraits must be ≥ 9.0, and no individual portrait can be below 7.0. A portrait that would read as AI-written is rejected before it reaches the customer. The substrate-honesty check is the third of the four pre-fire gates for the Week 5 launch.

The other three gates: state reconciliation (no drift between what is on disk and what is in the state files), review queue preservation (the 909 portraits that form the moat's evidence base are never deleted by automation), and a single synthetic end-to-end pass that proves the pipeline works on one customer before it runs on the public.

Eight probes. Five days. One portrait.