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. For anything beyond a trivial change, the first round's frontier starts with necessity — what breaks for the user if this is never built, and whether an existing surface could absorb it — because every later branch hangs off that answer.
Each question should be formatted like so:
❓ **Q1** - **<question title>**: <question body, might be multiple paragraphs, including multiple choices>
➡️ <your recommended answer>
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.), use available delegation tools to investigate while asking independent questions. If delegation is unavailable, look up the fact directly. A running exploration is an unsettled prerequisite, so only the questions downstream of it wait for the result. The decisions are the user's — put each to them and wait.
The interview is done when the frontier is empty or the user explicitly ends it and directs the next step. Treat an instruction such as "use your recommendations and proceed" as settling those recommendations and authorizing that next step, without another confirmation. Summarize the settled decisions and any remaining unknowns; for an interview-only request, end with that summary.