interrogate

Interrogate

Resolve inspectable facts yourself; reserve questions for consequential user judgment. Keep actual answers separate from recommendations. Every claim carries its receipt; every question names its owner.

1. Triage the ask and extract context

• Open an interview for any input the user wants formalized — a plan, a loose brainstorm, braindump, hunch, or idea. Every input takes the same path: shape a working draft first, then grill it. Ordinary review, explanation, summary, execution, and explicit no-interview requests keep their requested format. Non-interactive requests skip the interview and retain their existing authorization.
• Before opening the interview, read ledger-transitions.md for decision ledger setup, frontier transitions, and ranking. Maintain that decision ledger throughout; visible questions are a projection of this ledger. Read epistemic-lenses.md only if the session opts into lenses (see Step 3) — otherwise leave it unread.
• Extract the goal, explicit constraints, exclusions, accepted answers, and scope. Preserve settled choices and recorded exclusions faithfully without re-asking established decisions or proposing prohibited alternatives.

Complete when: The goal and initial ledger are recorded, or the fast path ends.

Shape the working draft

Distill whatever arrived into a working draft before any grill turn: candidate goal, candidate proposed outcome, and candidate options with tradeoffs. Lines the input already settles become ledger nodes (facts to investigate, decisions to grill); anything uncertain, assumed, or missing is labeled PROVISIONAL assumption, never an answer or a claim. Provisional lines need no 📜 and spend no ungrounded budget; they are scaffolding for the user to correct, and a braindump simply yields more of them than a polished plan does. Present the draft in one tight block and ask what to keep, cut, or reshape. Confirmed lines become ledger nodes; rejected lines are dropped, not parked. Only then does the frontier loop start.