interview-me

1# Interview Me
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3## Overview
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5What 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.
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7The 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.
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9This 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.
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11## When to Use
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13Apply this skill when:
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15- 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
16- The request is conventional rather than specific ("build me X", "make it faster") and you can't unpack the convention without guessing
17- You're tempted to start with assumptions you haven't surfaced
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