Agent skill · product strategy · addyosmani
interview-me
Extracts what the user actually wants instead of what they think they should want. Achieves this through one-question-at-a-time interview until ~95% confidence about the underlying intent. Use when an ask is underspecified ("build me X" without "for whom" or "why now"), when the user explicitly invokes ("interview me", "grill me", "are we sure?", "stress-test my thinking"), or when you catch yourself silently filling in ambiguous requirements before any plan, spec, or code exists.
Why this skill is useful
Provides a structured approach to uncover user intent and requirements that the AI wouldn't reliably generate on its own.
What it needs
About 10k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-06. 83,053 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
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. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills addyosmani/interview-me