Decision needed: the goal #79 elicitation method (E1–E4)

[obotclaw[bot]]

Decision needed on the method for the goal #79 elicitation exercise — the "interview me to figure out what I want" @jwildfire asked for on 2026-08-15 while reviewing A1–A4 (#149).

Full argument and evidence: the decision artifact. The protocol is already shipped as the /grill-me skill (obot.agent PR #96, merged standard lane) with the recommendations below as defaults — answering "defaults" in one line is a complete response; any pick amends the skill.

• E1 — Interview mode: (a) pure grill Q&A · (b) reactive-first hybrid — recommended (artifacts you correct, then targeted grill rounds) · (c) CSR-style proposal + decide-by-exception only.
• E2 — Question cadence: (a) one question at a time · (b) AskUserQuestion rounds of ≤4, one topic per 15–25-min session — recommended · (c) full-frontier rounds (~46 questions/sitting).
• E3 — Ledger home: (a) hub reports/goal-79-elicitation/ — recommended (per-answer commits free, Pages-reviewable) · (b) obot.agent interviews/ (PR per write) · (c) one hub issue per question.
• E4 — Goal-body capture: (a) body-edit grant asked as question zero, applied at wrap under the documented exception route — recommended · (b) proposed-body comment only, you apply by hand.

Context findings, one line each: the grill-me skill you remembered is real (Matt Pocock, mattpocock/skills, ~800k installs) but stateless/single-session, so we adapted its engine rather than adopting it; the CSR exercise you remembered worked because you reacted to a concrete proposal (its one tacit surfacing, #131, was an unsolicited objection) and because decide-by-exception questions cost you one message — while its open-ended pick-from-12 gate was never answered; the literature says a blank-page interview loses most of a domain (~70% omission), a comparison set of 3 unlocks criticism where 1 draft gets inflated approval, and only a hard devil's-advocate role produces real dissent from an LLM.

What unblocks: on "defaults", any session runs /grill-me 79 --prep; Phase 1 is a ~30-minute sitting whenever you want it; the wrap closes A3/A4 and produces the ratified #79 body + requirements. Total estimated cost to you: ~1.5–2.5 h across 4–6 short sittings.

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This discussion was drafted by Claude Code using Fable 5 in an unattended session (not yet reviewed by @jwildfire).

[obotclaw[bot]]

One topic for the agenda, from him, before this interview runs.

Deciding the demo study's published-branch size on 2026-08-15, @jwildfire added a sentence that was not about branch size at all: "the real issue is that we need to move to a more robust database instead of just leaning on github sooner or later. Add discussion of that approach to the upcoming grill-me session related to the app strategy/design."

It is written up as a prep topic on the goal issue, with five candidate questions for the interview to sharpen rather than answer: #79 (comment)

Flagging it here because this is the thread where the interview method is being settled — whatever E1–E4 becomes, that topic belongs on the frontier when the first session runs.

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This comment was drafted by Claude Code using Opus 5 and reviewed by @jwildfire

[obotclaw[bot]]

Decided 2026-08-15 — all four calls left standing as recommended. @jwildfire answered in the local Operations Dashboard rather than here, so this thread is not the record; the artifact is.

His words, verbatim: "sounds good. let's try it." He changed none of the four, which under the page's own rule ("replying 'defaults' is a complete answer") settles E1–E4 as recommended: build things for him to correct first and ask targeted questions after; small rounds of at most four questions, one topic per 15–25-minute sitting; the written record in a published folder on the roadmap site; and the agent writes the ratified goal statement into the goal itself once he approves it at the wrap. The /grill-me skill already shipped with exactly those defaults, so nothing needed amending — "let's try it" starts the interview rather than changing it.

The record is the Decisions section at the top of how to interview you about the app goal, and it now appears in the derived Decisions log.

Follow-through, filed under goal #79 on milestone 2026q3, nothing run yet:

• #192 — build the things he corrects (capability matrix, workflow walkthrough, three divergent drafts of the goal statement, mined candidate requirements). Costs him no time.
• #193 — run the sittings and ratify the goal statement. This is the one that needs him.

The two calls held open on the app plan rewrite, and the GitHub-as-datastore question he raised the same evening (the comment above), are seeded as first-sitting topics rather than answered here.

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This comment was drafted by Claude Code using Opus 5 in an unattended session, applying a decision @jwildfire had already recorded.