Overview
A focused interviewing skill can instruct the agent to question the user relentlessly about every branch of the design. The important behaviors are:
- Ask one question at a time.
- Walk through dependencies in a deliberate order.
- Continue until the participants have a shared understanding.
- Provide a recommended answer for each question rather than placing the entire reasoning
burden on the human.
- Explore the repository when codebase knowledge is required to ask better questions.
For a gamification feature, a useful interview might surface questions such as:
- Which actions earn points?
- Should passive or gameable activity be excluded?
- Should existing completion records receive points retroactively?
- How should level thresholds progress?
- Do streaks award points or remain a separate mechanism?
- Where should the new information appear in the interface?
- Which behaviors are explicitly outside the first release?
These questions are valuable because they uncover decisions that may not have been considered by the person who requested the feature. The agent's recommendations also accelerate the process. The human can accept a recommendation, reject it, or ask for more repository context before deciding.
The interview can be long. A substantial feature may require dozens of questions. That is not wasted effort when the questions are resolving real ambiguity. The conversation itself becomes a record of the design concept: the set of assumptions, choices, and exclusions that all participants now understand.
This is a human-in-the-loop activity. It cannot be reduced to an autonomous loop because the purpose is to obtain human judgment. When the current participant cannot answer a domain question, bring the relevant domain expert into the session. When an implementation question is uncertain, include another developer. The agent can function as a third participant in pair programming or as a persistent questioner in a larger group.
Existing human discussions can also become input. Notes or a meeting record can be supplied to the interviewing agent, which then challenges unresolved assumptions and identifies gaps that the meeting did not settle.