Dark-Alex-17andSisyphus
45333db5c2
Ultraworked with [Sisyphus](https://github.com/code-yeongyu/oh-my-openagent) Co-authored-by: Sisyphus <clio-agent@sisyphuslabs.ai>
4.1 KiB
description
| description |
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| Interview the user relentlessly about a plan, decision, or design until shared understanding is reached. Structures the interview as a design tree worked in frontier rounds - every currently-answerable question asked in one numbered round, each with a recommended answer; facts are fetched by the agent, only decisions go to the user. Load when converging on a design before authoring a plan, stress-testing a decision, or the user asks to be grilled. |
Interview the user relentlessly until you reach a shared understanding. Map the topic as a design tree: every decision branches into the decisions that hang off it. Freeform Q&A wanders and silently assumes; the tree makes coverage checkable.
Frontier rounds
Work the tree in rounds. The frontier is every decision whose prerequisites are already settled: the questions you can ask now without guessing at answers you haven't heard yet. Ask the WHOLE frontier in one round — numbered, each with your recommended answer. Then wait for the user's answers before the next round.
Format a round like so:
❓ **Q1 - <question title>**: <question body; may be several paragraphs, may offer lettered choices>
➡️ <your recommended answer, with the one-line reason>
---
❓ **Q2 - <question title>**: <question body>
➡️ <your recommended answer>
Rules of the round:
- A question whose answer depends on another question still open in THIS round belongs to a later round, not this one. No stacked hypotheticals.
- Recommendations are mandatory. "What do you want?" with no recommendation offloads thinking to the user; a recommendation they can veto in one word is cheaper for them and faster for you.
- Each answered round reshapes the tree: settled decisions push the frontier outward and unblock dependents. Recompute the frontier and ask the next round.
- Partial answers are fine — re-ask what's unanswered in the next round, reshaped by what did land.
Facts are your job; decisions are the user's
Never ask the user for anything you could look up yourself. When a frontier question needs a fact from the environment (what the code does today, what a library supports, what the config says), fetch it: use your own tools, or dispatch a sub-agent (explore for the codebase, librarian for external references) when you can spawn them.
Don't block the round on a running fact-fetch: only the questions downstream of that fact wait; ask the rest of the frontier now.
The decisions — trade-offs, priorities, scope, business rules — are the user's. Put each one to them and wait. Never answer your own question and move on; a grilling session where the agent supplies the user's side has failed.
Interaction surface
The round format above is chat text — use it whenever a round has more than one question. Reserve the user__select/user__confirm/user__input tools for a genuinely single blocking fork; forcing a multi-question round through one-question-at-a-time prompts destroys the parallelism that makes rounds efficient.
Completion
The session is done when the frontier is empty: every branch of the design tree visited, nothing left silently assumed. Then:
- Summarize the settled decisions as a flat list (decision → one-line rationale).
- Ask the user to confirm the shared understanding.
- Do NOT act on the outcome (write the plan, start the implementation) until they confirm.
Settled decisions belong in whatever artifact follows (the plan's "Alternatives considered"/decision log) — an unrecorded decision WILL be re-litigated later.
Anti-patterns
- Asking one question per message when five are independently answerable — that's a slow-motion round.
- Asking questions the codebase answers — grep first, ask never.
- Questions without recommendations.
- Stacked hypotheticals ("if we go with A, then for the storage would you...") — that's a later round.
- Declaring understanding while branches remain unvisited, or acting before the user confirms.
- Interrogating past the point of value: when a branch's remaining questions no longer change what gets built, prune it and say so.