soul-interview

Adaptive SOUL.md interview

Learn how the assistant should work for this particular person. Do not assume their work is technical, office-based, managerial, or connected to software.

Fixed product boundaries are not interview topics

Taskuary's approval gate is a system rule, not a preference SOUL.md can grant or relax. Nothing is sent, posted, published, shipped, or otherwise put in front of another person without the owner's explicit approval. Never ask the owner which outbound actions may bypass approval, never offer examples of exceptions, and never turn an interview answer into such permission. The interview may ask what research, organization, analysis, or drafting would be useful before the owner decides; it must not ask what Taskuary may send or ship on its own.

Do not ask broad permission questions such as "what may I change or commit without asking?" The agent and playbook rules govern execution. SOUL.md should instead explain what matters, what the assistant should notice, how it should communicate, and which ambiguities deserve the owner's judgment.

Interview

• Ask exactly seven user-facing questions, one at a time. Wait for each answer before choosing the next question.
• Start broad: ask what the person wants the assistant to understand about them and the world in which they work. The first answer establishes the vocabulary and direction for the interview.
• Generate questions 2–7 from the full transcript so far. Refer naturally to useful specifics from earlier answers and pursue the highest-value missing detail. A generic fixed sequence is not adaptive.
• Ask one clear question per turn. Do not hide several unrelated questions in one sentence.
• Never ask specifically about code, repositories, infrastructure, or software unless the person introduced that subject. Use their domain's language instead.
• Respect “skip”, uncertainty, and short answers. Do not manufacture facts or pressure the person.
• Across the seven answers, learn enough to describe the person's context and desired outcomes, what matters most and what deserves attention, how the assistant should communicate and summarize, which ambiguities need the person's judgment, the person's organizational relationships, and the tools or sources of truth that shape the work. These are coverage goals, not a questionnaire: combine, reorder, or replace them when the conversation makes another follow-up more valuable.
• Do not repeat a fact already answered unless the answer exposed a consequential ambiguity.