interview

interview is a skill for Claude Code from mthines/agent-skills. It costs 203 tokens per session (2,022 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A requirements interview process for software work that clarifies the request before planning or coding begins. It examines the codebase, identifies unknowns and non-goals, and records the agreed scope.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to research a project, ask focused questions, surface edge cases, document assumptions, and produce a brief that planning can rely on.
Why use it?
It prevents teams from implementing an ambiguous request based on assumptions that were never confirmed.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: disable-model-invocation in frontmatter. Also seen: names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the mthines-agent-skills plugin — 57 skills, 5 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to research a project, ask focused questions, surface edge cases, document assumptions, and produce a brief that planning can rely on.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mthines/agent-skills/interview
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.

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

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install mthines-agent-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 57 skills, 5 agents.

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

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mthines/agent-skills/interview/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mthines/agent-skills/interview)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mthines/agent-skills/interview"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mthines/agent-skills/interview/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for interview

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mthines/agent-skills/interview"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mthines/agent-skills/interview.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 203 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,022 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00203 $0.02022
Opus 5.5 $0.00081 $0.00809
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00041 $0.00404
Haiku 4.5 $0.00020 $0.00202

Measured 1mo ago against content hash 6745da8a4692, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, 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 1mo 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/analysis/interview/SKILL.md · 126 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 126 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Interview

Turns an underspecified request into a confirmed, thought-through scope before a single line is planned or written. It restates and diffs the request, researches the code so its questions are specific, surfaces the unknowns and non-goals, interviews the user only where research falls short, and emits a brief.md that planning consumes.

This SKILL.md is a thin index. Phase procedures live in rules/*.md and load on demand. A full worked run lives in references/interview-example.md.

Contents


When it runs

$ARGUMENTS is the request to align on (free text). If $ARGUMENTS is empty, use the current conversation's active request; if there is none, ask what to scope — never interview against a guessed request.

Flag Default Meaning
--non-interactive off Do not prompt the user. Surface the questions inside brief.md under Open questions, proceed on stated assumptions, and set the readiness verdict. For headless callers that cannot prompt.

This skill is adaptive. When the request is already crisp and research answers the open questions, it asks nothing, writes a one-line pass note plus the brief, and returns ready. It interrupts only for a genuine, load-bearing unknown — see rules/readiness-gate.md.

Relation to aw and ideate (precedence)

  • Autonomous-implementation asks ("implement X autonomously", "ship this", /aw) are owned by aw, which runs this interview inside its Phase 0 (default-on for Full tier — see rules/aw-integration.md) — do not also fire standalone; let aw drive.
  • Standalone /interview is for the explicit "help me scope this first" moment on non-aw or ambiguous work.
  • For solution options, not scope, use /ideate — it diverges and scores; this skill converges on the one scope.

Read the full file on GitHub · 126 lines

Files

What ships with it

8 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. 1mo ago Changed 6745da8a4692
  2. 1mo ago First seen · 126 lines · 203 tokens per session scan A 40adbb95b8b8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

interview is a skill published in the GitHub repository mthines/agent-skills (19 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 203 tokens to every session and 2,022 once invoked, about $0.0008 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-08-31.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

skill-body

Call help() or help("page.click") to print signatures and uncommon options of APIs named below; it prints by itself, so do not wrap it in console.log. For installation or connection problems, read references/install.md in the ego-browser Skill directory.

citrolabs/ego-lite · 0 tokens

ego-browser

When you need a browser, read this Skill by default. Use it to open and operate websites, fill forms, click buttons, take screenshots, extract page data, sign in, and perform other browser automation tasks, as well as web app testing, dogfooding, QA, bug investigation, and app-quality review. ego-browser (ego-lite) is…

citrolabs/ego-lite · 125 tokens

ego-lite-simplify

Find and implement evidence-backed simplifications in the ego-lite repository. Use when reviewing the codebase for dead code, duplicated state or APIs, speculative abstractions, unnecessary compatibility layers, hand-written infrastructure, excessive tests or documentation, or when the user asks to reduce code size or…

citrolabs/ego-lite · 68 tokens

temporal-developer

Develop, debug, and manage Temporal applications across Python, TypeScript, Go, Java, .NET, Ruby, and Rust. Use when the user is building workflows, activities, workers, or background job queues with a Temporal SDK, debugging issues like non-determinism errors, stuck workflows, or activity retries, using Temporal CLI…

temporalio/skill-temporal-developer · 165 tokens

custom-icons

Create or refine custom icon assets as native or traced SVGs and transparent PNG/WebP files. Use when the user asks for a bespoke icon or cohesive icon set, wants an image traced into a clean vector, or needs a detailed or 3D icon with transparency.

JKc66/custom-icons-skill · 57 tokens

geekx-gate

A review framework for deciding whether an engineering idea or technical commitment is necessary, too broad, or premature. It examines the real problem, complexity, evidence, non-goals, and ease of reversal.

geekjourneyx/geekx-skills · 155 tokens