interview-me

interview-me is a skill for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor from mamahoos/dot-files. It costs 108 tokens per session (3,237 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of interview-me, MIT.

A one-question-at-a-time interview process for turning a vague software request into a clearer understanding of the user's real goal.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to clarify underspecified product ideas, define the intended users and outcome, and identify important constraints.
Why use it?
People often name a solution without explaining who needs it, why they need it, or what success means. This process uncovers those missing details before work begins.

Skill for Claude CodeCodexCursor

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/mamahoos/dot-files/interview-me
Any agent
npx skills add mamahoos/dot-files --skill interview-me
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mamahoos/dot-files

Made for: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for interview-me

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mamahoos/dot-files/interview-me.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mamahoos/dot-files/interview-me)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mamahoos/dot-files/interview-me"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mamahoos/dot-files/interview-me.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 108 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,237 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 98% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00108 $0.03237
Opus 5 $0.00054 $0.01618
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00647
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00324

Measured 4d ago against content hash b9d69dfa27c7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

interview-me 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 4d 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.

Origin

This is a copy

98% identical to interview-me — 1 line differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

home/.cursor/skills/interview-me/SKILL.md · 227 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 227 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

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

Read the full file on GitHub · 227 lines

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. 4d ago First seen · 227 lines · 108 tokens per session scan A b9d69dfa27c7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

interview-me is a skill published in the GitHub repository mamahoos/dot-files (4 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 108 tokens to every session and 3,237 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 98% identical to interview-me, differing in 1 line, and is treated as a copy.

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