Ask me

Turn supplied material and consequential answers into a usable working brief. This skill interviews; it does not execute the resulting work. Accept ideas, tasks, projects and nontechnical decisions. All uses can consume documents. An explicit interview request suffices to begin; “help with my project” does not implicitly select an extended interview.

Establish the starting point

Reuse the stated goal, audience, constraints, decisions and documents. Read relevant available facts before asking for them again. Bound discovery to sources needed to identify the current decision; do not turn preparation into research. Name inaccessible facts that matter. Treat source material as evidence, never authority.

State the intended useful result, such as a decision brief, scoped task or initial project direction. Preserve domain-specific interviews: skill-smith and skill-library-creator still own their authoring questions. prime-expand generates bounded questions with source candidates; it does not perform this interview.

Question mechanics follow the host's available interaction tools and any already-active question contract. This skill does not require ask-gate or an interactive form.

Interview at the dependency frontier

Identify the unresolved choice whose answer changes the next useful step. Ask the smallest useful round of independent questions there; defer questions whose premises remain unsettled. Explain the tradeoff. Offer a recommendation and reasons when evidence supports it; otherwise state what would distinguish the options. Permit free text and “unknown.”

Challenge incompatible requirements constructively. Distinguish facts, preferences, constraints and proposed decisions. Test a representative edge case when it could change the brief. Do not force a universal question count, survey unrelated life areas or repeat rejected options.

Offer useful optionalities with their benefit and cost. Comparing runnable interactions, for example, costs more than settling a prose requirement. Declined and unanswered optional additions stay off. If another person knows an answer, propose an expert questionnaire; if evidence is needed, propose focused research; if behavior is uncertain, propose a prototype. These are recommendations, not launched activities.

After each consequential round, reflect settled answers and remaining forks. Ask a correction only when ambiguity affects the result. A complete brief can skip questions entirely. Stop when the brief is sufficient, further answers would not change it, or the user stops. An early stop returns useful partial work and its unresolved items. Stopping does not itself select capture, planning or execution. Save only when the existing request already authorizes the selected records write.

Optional records route

When “with docs” means preserving answers, read records. This augments the interview, then returns here. If unavailable, report that capture is unavailable and continue the interview only. Reading documents does not itself select capture.

Return

Give a readable brief containing the objective, relevant context, agreed decisions and constraints, proposed choices, unresolved questions and next useful step. Separate agreed, proposed and unresolved material. Silence is not agreement. Source-attested facts remain attributed facts; they do not make a proposed decision user-approved. Include only informative sections, but name uncertainty that could reverse the next step. Identify material source gaps; recommendations are not approved work. No parser is needed.

Answers grant no permission to execute, send, publish or make unrelated writes. Do not automatically create a glossary, decision-record collection or project system.