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RagnarPitlaRagnarPitla/microsoft-agent-skills-private-archive/.cursor/rules/discovery.mdc

microsoft-agent-skills-private-archive / rules

Cursor rule2 starsChanged 2 months agoMITView on GitHub

A structured interview that pins down what you are actually building before you build it.

We split this discovery.mdc into the rules it gives an agent

1 rule. About 0 are common, 1 is distinctive, and 0 are very specific to this project.

  • ≈0

    Common · estimate

    Many files like this have a rule of this kind.

  • ≈1

    Distinctive · estimate

    This author's own choices. Worth a look.

  • 0

    Very specific

    Tied to their project's names, files or tools. Probably skip.

  • Common
  • Distinctive
  • Very specific
  1. Distinctive:

    When the frontier is empty, produce a short written summary the user could send to a stakeholder without editing: the problem, the …

    line 18

≈ “Common” is an estimate: at least 1 in 5 of the 6,350 Cursor rule files we read have a rule of the same kind, not the same words. “Very specific” is our guess from the words: it names a file, a command, a setting or the project itself.

Keep what fits and drop the rest. Your version, ready for your agents.
Files
discovery.mdc
---
description: "A structured interview that pins down what you are actually building before you build it."
alwaysApply: false
---

<!-- Generated from SKILL.md by scripts/build-harnesses.mjs. Do not edit by hand; run `npm run build`. -->
<!-- Source: skills/deliver/discovery/SKILL.md -->
Invoke the `structured-interview` skill.

Frame it as a discovery session: the user has an idea, a request from a customer, or a vague ask from a stakeholder, and does not yet have something that could be built, estimated or approved.

Two things to hold on to that the primitive does not assume:

**The person in front of you may not be the person who decides.** Ask early who has to agree to this. If a decision belongs to someone not in the room, do not let the user guess on their behalf. Record it as an open question with a named owner, and keep going. A discovery session that produces three named open questions is more useful than one that produces eight confident guesses.

**Separate what is wanted from what is asked for.** People arrive with a solution already chosen, usually the one they last saw demonstrated. Ask what happens today, what is wrong with it, and what would be different if this worked. Do that before discussing any Microsoft product by name. If the underlying problem does not need an agent, say so; that is a successful discovery session, not a failed one.

When the frontier is empty, produce a short written summary the user could send to a stakeholder without editing: the problem, the decisions taken and why, the open questions with owners, and what "done" means. Keep it in their vocabulary, not the product's.

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What did you use it for? e.g. Reviewing pull requests in a Rails app

Using an agent? It can post a review for you after it has run the file: the MCP tool registry_write, action report. How to connect one.

Your trail

Files you open will collect here, so you can find them again.

Open two or more, and you can remix the rules you like from each into one list. Kept in this browser only.

Now do this for your own.

Bring your CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md or skills. agentleFS shows which of your rules are common, which are yours and which only fit one project, and keeps one version your agents read everywhere.

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