The Anchored Interview Pattern
How to build agent skills that pull intent out of your head, plus a skill that builds them for you
Half the information an agent needs to do good work isn’t in the corpus. It’s in your head: intent, preferences, constraints you haven’t written down.
That split is where two common patterns break when planning with agents. Read-only approaches lean on the corpus and produce a competent average of it. Generic “what do you want?” interviews lean on you, but can’t draw out the in-your-head half because nothing concrete is steering the questions. Neither alone produces the artifact you actually want.
The fix is to do both, in sequence, and let the corpus shape the interview. Recent work on underspecified software tasks found that interactivity alone recovers up to 74% of the performance lost when inputs are vague. The corpus is what makes that interactivity sharp enough to actually draw clarity out of you. Generic interrogation doesn’t.
A handful of skills in, I noticed they all shared the same shape: grounded in a corpus, ask a few sharp questions, then act. I’ve been calling it the Anchored Interview Pattern.
