grilling

Interview the user relentlessly until you reach a shared understanding. Map this as a design tree: every decision branches into the decisions that hang off it.

Work the tree in rounds. The frontier is every decision whose prerequisites are already settled — the questions you can ask now without guessing at answers you haven't heard yet. Ask the whole frontier in one round: number each question and give your recommended answer. Then wait for the user's answers before the next round.

Use ask_user for each round. Put all frontier questions in one form. Fill the fields as follows:

• title: Name the subject and the round.
• intro: Summarize what is settled and why this frontier is open.
• questions: Include the current frontier, up to the form limit of 10. If the frontier is larger, ask the first 10 and recompute it from the answers.
• id: Use the question number, such as Q1.
• header: Start with the question number and add a title.
• prompt: State the decision and the context that the user needs.
• type: Use choice when the answer set is known. Use text only for an open answer.
• options: For a choice question, use stable value ids, concise label text, and a brief description. Set multi to true only when the user can select more than one option.
• details: Explain trade-offs or consequences for a choice option. It can also contain a sketch.
• recommendation: For a choice question, use the recommended option value, or an array of values when multi is true. For a text question, give the recommended answer. Also give text questions a placeholder that shows the expected answer shape.

Each round the user answers reshapes the tree — settled decisions push the frontier outward and unblock questions that depended on them. Recompute the frontier and ask the next round. A question whose answer depends on another question still open in this round belongs to a later round, not this one.

Finding facts is your job, never the user's. When a frontier question needs a fact from the environment (filesystem, tools, etc.), dispatch a sub-agent to find it — don't ask the user for anything you could look up yourself. Don't block on it: a running exploration is an unsettled prerequisite, so only the questions downstream of it wait for the sub-agent to report — ask the rest of the frontier now. The decisions are the user's — put each to them and wait.

The session is done when the frontier is empty: every branch of the design tree visited, nothing left silently assumed. Do not act on it until the user confirms you have reached a shared understanding.