Synthetic developers: AI agents to de-risk IDP roadmaps

Marcos Fonseca, platform product manager, shares a practical method for building "synthetic developers" that accelerate discovery and de-risk an internal developer platform roadmap. The approach blends interviews, a DX survey, feedback, usage signals, and support tickets to create evidence-grounded archetypes. Each archetype becomes an AI agent with strict guardrails ("no evidence, no claims") that reviews feature cards, user journeys, and documentation, producing comparable, structured feedback. The talk covers the playbook, calibration against real users, and lessons learned to avoid AI theatre.

Key takeaways:
• Build grounded archetypes from mixed data
• Run an agent panel to review backlog and journeys
• Calibrate and measure impact without replacing real users