interview-melisted

# Interview Me > Cherry-picked from [addyosmani/agent-skills](https://github.com/addyosmani/agent-skills) (MIT) 2026-05-26. ## Overview What people ask for and what they actually want are different things. They ask for "a dashboard" because that's what one asks for, not because a dashboard solves their problem. They say "make it faster" without a number to hit. The cheapest moment to find this gap is before any plan, spec, or code exists. Once you've started building, switching costs are real, and the user will rationalize the wrong thing into a "good enough" thing. The misfit gets locked in. This skill closes the gap before it costs anything. It complements (does not replace) batched-options elicitation skills: this skill is for free-form interview when you don't yet know enough to offer a bounded set of choices. Use the batched-options skill when the user knows roughly what they want but needs to pick between framings; use this skill when you can't write a one-sentence statement of intent yet. ## When to Use Apply this skill when: - The ask is missing at least one of: **who** the user is, **why** they want it, what **success** looks like, what the binding **constraint** is - The request is conventional rather than specific ("build me X", "make it faster") and you can't unpack the convention without guessing - You're tempted to start with assumptions you haven't surfaced - The user hasn't said which value they're optimizing for when two reasonable ones are in tension