interview

A guided question-and-answer review for testing a raw idea before writing a detailed specification. It examines assumptions, unclear points, trade-offs, and possible new directions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before feature specification for product ideas, content projects, business plans, architecture choices, or refactoring approaches.
Why use it?
It exposes weak or vague parts of an idea early, when changing the idea is cheaper than changing a finished plan or implementation.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/genkovich/sdd/interview
Any agent
npx skills add genkovich/sdd --skill interview
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/genkovich/sdd

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 202 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,915 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00202 $0.01915
Opus 5 $0.00101 $0.00958
Sonnet 5 $0.00040 $0.00383
Haiku 4.5 $0.00020 $0.00192

Measured 2d ago against content hash 115b5c5485e7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

interview scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/interview/SKILL.md · 152 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 152 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill: interview

Pressure-tests an idea before it becomes a spec. The user shares a raw idea; across 3 phases you surface hidden assumptions, name tradeoffs, expose imprecisions, and propose fresh angles — then hand the survivor to specify. This is the optional pre-backbone step: it makes specify cheaper by killing or reshaping a weak idea before any spec gets written.

Scope: any idea. Product, content, business, architecture, refactor approach — all in scope. The boundary: this is an interview about the idea, not codebase archaeology. Ask the user to articulate the idea in words first. Consult files only if the user explicitly invites it; default is interview-first, no unprompted grep/find/read.

Language. Respond in the user's language; the instructions here are English for clarity.

The depth dial and the Socratic posture are SDD-wide: → ../_shared/interview-depth.md · ../_shared/ask-style.md

Depth dial — set this first

One AskUserQuestion, then commit (default medium). The dial is SDD-wide; interview's delta — the 3–4 / 6–10 / 10–15 question budget per level and each level's posture — is the canonical interview row in ../_shared/interview-depth.md (no table duplicated here).

The adversarial triggers (grill / rip apart / розʼєби / погрилити) imply hard unless the user says otherwise. State the depth in one line, then start.

Hard rules

  1. Every question goes through AskUserQuestion, not free text — 2-4 concrete options, the first marked (Recommended), each option's description spelling out what follows from it. Free text slips into "I don't know" and loses signal.
  2. One question at a time. The user answers with full context on the previous answer, and you adapt the next question to it.
  3. Recommendation is mandatory. Always carry a position inside the Recommended option — a neutral interviewer surfaces less than one with a take the user can argue against.
  4. Don't skip phases. No alternatives before intent is clear; no grilling tradeoffs before the idea is understood.

Read the full file on GitHub · 152 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 152 lines · 202 tokens per session scan A 115b5c5485e7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

interview is a skill published in the GitHub repository genkovich/sdd (118 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 202 tokens to every session and 1,915 once invoked, about $0.0010 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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