interview-me

Interview Me

Overview

What people ask for and what they actually want are different things. They ask for "a dashboard" because that's what one asks for, not because a dashboard solves their problem. They say "make it faster" without a number to hit.

The cheapest moment to find this gap is before any plan, spec, or code exists. Once you've started building, switching costs are real, and the user will rationalize the wrong thing into a "good enough" thing. The misfit gets locked in.

This skill closes the gap before it costs anything. The other Define-phase skills assume you already know roughly what you want: idea-refine generates variations from an idea, spec-driven-development writes the requirements down, doubt-driven-development stress-tests a plan after you've drafted one. Interview-me is the part before all of those, where you ask one question at a time, with your best guess attached, until you can predict what the user is going to say before they say it.

When to Use

Apply this skill when:

• The ask is missing at least one of: who the user is, why they want it, what success looks like, what the binding constraint is
• The request is conventional rather than specific ("build me X", "make it faster") and you can't unpack the convention without guessing
• You're tempted to start with assumptions you haven't surfaced
• The user hasn't said which value they're optimizing for when two reasonable ones are in tension (simplicity vs. flexibility, cost vs. speed)
• The user explicitly invokes: "interview me", "grill me", "before we start, are we sure?", "stress-test my thinking"

When NOT to use:

• The ask is unambiguous and self-contained ("rename this variable", "fix this typo")
• The user has explicitly asked for speed over verification
• Pure information requests ("how does X work?", "what does this code do?")
• Mechanical operations (renames, formats, file moves)
• You already have ≥95% confidence; re-read the stop condition below before assuming you don't