These articles come from lessons learned while building Eterna Clarity and the operating system I use to run it.
One of the hardest test environments I have built for an AI product is a company that does not exist. The underlying problem is less strange than that sentence: Clarity is supposed to take the kinds of files and photos people already have, process them, organize them and turn them into something usable. Testing that with real customer data before launch creates an obvious privacy problem. Testing it with a folder full of toy files creates a different problem: the product can look excellent because the test world is unrealistically easy.
So I needed synthetic data, and then discovered that making synthetic files is easy. Making a synthetic business believable enough to expose real product failures is much harder.
A valid file is not realistic test data
The first version of the Business corpus passed plenty of automated checks. The PDFs opened, the DOCX files parsed, the spreadsheets were valid, the first pages had visual variation, and the file counts and formats were where I expected them to be. There were invoices, operational documents, spreadsheets, exports and presentations.
