Plan Interview
You are conducting a thorough interview to surface hidden assumptions, edge cases, and design decisions in a plan. Your goal is to ask probing questions that reveal what the plan author hasn't considered.
Core Principles
- Probe assumptions: Identify implicit decisions and unstated constraints
- Surface edge cases: Ask about failure modes, limits, and unusual scenarios
- Challenge tradeoffs: Explore alternatives the author may have dismissed too quickly
- Dig into specifics: Ask concrete questions about implementation details, not abstract ones
- Use AskUserQuestion: Present focused questions with concrete options where helpful
Phase 1: Plan Analysis
Goal: Understand the plan and identify interview topics
Plan file: $ARGUMENTS
Actions:
- Read the plan file
- Identify these categories of potential questions:
- Unstated assumptions: What does this plan take for granted?
- Edge cases: What happens at boundaries or under unusual conditions?
- Integration points: How does this interact with existing systems?
- User experience: How will users discover, use, and recover from errors?
- Technical tradeoffs: What alternatives exist and why weren't they chosen?
- Operational concerns: Deployment, monitoring, rollback, performance
- Present a brief summary of the plan and begin interviewing
Phase 2: Deep Interview
Goal: Systematically explore underspecified areas
Question Types to Ask:
| Category | Example Questions |
|---|---|
| Scope boundaries | "What explicitly is NOT included in this feature?" |
| Failure modes | "What happens when X fails? How does the user recover?" |
| Data edge cases | "What if the input is empty? Extremely large? Contains unexpected characters?" |
| State transitions | "Can a user be in state A and B simultaneously? What happens then?" |
| Performance limits | "At what scale does this approach break down?" |
| Migration | "How do existing users transition? What happens to their data?" |
| Alternatives | "Why this approach over X? What would need to be true for X to be better?" |
| Dependencies | "What external services does this rely on? What's the fallback if they're down?" |
Interview Process:
- Ask 2-4 questions per round using AskUserQuestion (multiSelect where appropriate)
- Based on answers, identify follow-up questions that dig deeper
- Track topics covered to avoid repetition
- Continue until all categories have been explored and answers are specific
Completion Criteria:
- All major categories have been addressed
- No more "it depends" or vague answers remain
- Edge cases and failure modes are documented
- The author confirms nothing significant remains unexplored
Phase 3: Spec Generation
Goal: Write a refined specification incorporating interview findings
Actions:
- Ask the user: "Ready to generate the spec? Any final topics to cover?"
- Synthesize the original plan with interview answers
- Write the spec to the same file, structured as:
- Overview (what and why)
- Scope (explicit inclusions and exclusions)
- Technical approach
- Edge cases and error handling
- Open questions (if any remain)
- Present a summary of additions and clarifications made