New Work Tool Shares Your Personality Type Only If You Choose
Your team could see your Myers-Briggs type — but you hold the switch.
A new technical report describes a small piece of software called TeamLens, built inside a design-collaboration app named Critsly. The idea is simple: on a team board, you can choose to post your personality type — the kind of four-letter label from the Myers-Briggs test, like "ENFJ" — so colleagues can see how the group is composed. The author's stated goal is the opposite of a personality quiz you're forced to take. Sharing is fully optional, and the tool shows only descriptive counts, not judgments about who will perform well.
The paper is careful about consent in a way that's worth noticing. Signing up for an account is separate from revealing your type. You get separate buttons to hide your result from others, to pull back a single report, or to delete everything you've ever shared. In plain terms: joining the team doesn't mean handing over your personality, and you can take it back later. That's a meaningful design choice at a time when workplace monitoring tools often make sharing the default.
How do we know it works? Mostly through automated testing, not people. The author ran 65,536 possible combinations of sixteen personality reports through the system and checked every one against an independent calculation. All matched. Another 128 test cases matched too, after 4,259 simulated "share" actions. A web test passed 183 checks. The one number with real-world flavor is speed: in 180 timed runs, looking up a board's composition took about 0.064 milliseconds with an empty board and about 200 milliseconds with 1,024 profiles — fast enough, but roughly 3,000 times slower at scale.
The honest catch is stated plainly in the paper itself. These results describe software behavior under artificial conditions. They prove nothing about whether people actually find the tool useful, whether personality labels predict anything real about teamwork, or whether it would hold up with thousands of real users. The author also discloses that OpenAI's Codex, an AI coding assistant, helped write the code, run the evaluation, and draft the paper — with the limits of that help spelled out. Treat this as a careful engineering write-up, not evidence that reading your colleagues' personality types makes teams better.
- TeamLens lets you post your Myers-Briggs personality type on a team board — but only if you opt in, and you can delete it anytime
- The system separates having an account from revealing your type, so joining a team doesn't force you to share anything personal
- All testing was done with simulated data, not real employees — so nobody knows yet whether it actually helps teams work better
Why It Matters
If your workplace adopts personality tools, you deserve a real opt-out — this shows one way that could work.