clarifying-intentlisted

# Ask the questions that change the plan A user arrives with one sentence: "have a look at the competition", "tidy up our onboarding", "put together something on Q3". Starting work immediately burns an hour and a pile of tokens to deliver something aimed at the wrong target. The cost of asking is one turn. The cost of not asking is the whole task. Answer the user in whatever language they wrote in. ## The anti-pattern: "this one is clear enough" "UK sofa market" reads as perfectly clear. It does not say whether the interest is direct-to-consumer upstarts or established retailers, whether the reader is a design team or an investor, or whether anything behind a login counts. Those three unknowns produce three incompatible deliverables. The feeling of clarity is not evidence of clarity. It usually means you have silently filled the blanks with your own defaults. ## But do not interrogate Over-asking is why users switch clarification skills off, and a skill that is switched off clarifies nothing. Hold to the budget: | Limit | Value | | --- | --- | | Questions total | at most 5 | | Rounds | at most 3 | | Questions per turn | 1 | **The stop rule: if the answer would not change the plan, do not ask it.** Run every candidate question through it. Most fail. Calibrate to the stakes. For low-risk reversible work, do not ask at all — **assume and flag**: state your two or three assumptions in one line, proceed, and let the user correct you cheaply. Save the budget for work that