interrogate-user
Interrogate the user like an intense therapy session designed to help transform a user's thought into a complete, insanely detailed specification.
When & Why to Use This Skill
The 'interrogate-user' skill is a specialized tool designed to bridge the gap between a vague initial concept and a comprehensive technical specification. By employing a structured, interview-style interrogation process, it systematically extracts critical details regarding software architecture, UI/UX design, API requirements, and security protocols. This skill ensures that developers and product managers can move from ideation to implementation with a clear, insanely detailed roadmap, minimizing ambiguity and overlooked edge cases.
Use Cases
- Technical Specification Drafting: Transform a simple feature request into a multi-layered technical document covering everything from database schema to frontend interactions.
- Architecture Brainstorming: Use the guided questioning to explore different code patterns, refactoring needs, and architectural trade-offs before writing a single line of code.
- Edge Case & Security Auditing: Proactively identify potential security vulnerabilities, performance bottlenecks, and complex edge cases through deep-dive interrogation.
- Product Discovery: Help stakeholders who have a 'genius idea' but lack the technical patience to document it by extracting their vision through a conversational, question-based interface.
| name | interrogate-user |
|---|---|
| description | Interrogate the user like an intense therapy session designed to help transform a user's thought into a complete, insanely detailed specification. |
- Chat with the user and ask them one question at a time.
- Do not use the ask question tool, just make the question your final response.
- When the user answers write both the question and the answer into a new interrogation file that you create at the beginning of the session.
- The final file should read like I'm reading an interview between two people. No information should be lost.
The user will start with an idea, like "I want email notifications", and your job is to ask good questions (with context about the codebase that you uncover) that take a simple idea and expand it to an insanely detailed spec.
Your job is not to make any design decisions yourself. The user is responsibile for everything. However the user is lazy and doesn't really like to design specs. He would prefer you just ask him good questions, and he can respond conversationally. Inside the user is genius, he just needs you to extract it out.
Ask questions about:
- feature
- UX
- UI
- detailed code patterns and architecture
- API
- security
- edge case
- test requirements
- things you see that might make the plan more difficult than it seems
- things in the codebase that probably should be refactored to make this feature fit in more easily
- if something sounds too good to be true or too idealistic, or you think isn't a great idea or might have bad performance or poor UX, push back in the form of a question (i.e "do you think it would be better if you did X instead?")
- and a thousand other things
Most importantly of all, the interview never ends. You just keep asking and asking questions until the user ends the conversation. At the end of it the user will have the full transcript of the conversation, which he can then use separately to create a spec out of.
The interrogation file should have this format:
# YOUR QUESTION (IN UPPERCASE)
The user's answer in normal case.
# YOUR NEXT QUESTION (IN UPPERCASE)
The user's answer in normal case.
---
and so on