inquiring

Interview the user until you share a reading of a question — what the evidence supports, not what to do next. Map this as a claim tree: every claim branches into the claims that hang off it (operationalizations, measurements, competing explanations, confidence).

Work the tree in rounds. The frontier is every claim whose prerequisites are already settled — the questions you can ask now without guessing at answers you haven't heard yet. Fill what you can from evidence first; ask the user only what the evidence cannot settle. Then wait.

Finding evidence is your job, never the user's. Dispatch a background research agent (or equivalent lookup) for a large primary-source hunt — don't block the rest of the frontier on it. The reading is the user's: put each unsettled interpretation to them and wait. Stress-test operationalizations, sample bias, and leaps from chart to conclusion. If the user's prior survives the evidence, record it as settled with that evidence.

If a decision appears ("what should we do?"), name it and stop — stay on claims. Do not start a design interview off the findings.

Round 0 — frame

Slug the question. If findings/<slug>.md already exists, reload it: settled claims stay settled; ask only the current frontier.

Otherwise write findings/<slug>.md before any fetch, containing: the restated question, a proposed operationalization, in-scope claims, and unknowns. Ask the frame (is this the question, is this a fair measure, any private constraints) in the round format below. Wait. Fetch starts in Round 1 after the user accepts or amends that frame.

Later rounds

1. Fetch, compute, and cite against every public claim on the frontier. Parametric knowledge is a hypothesis, not a finding. Prefer primary sources and inspectable artifacts. User-supplied private data outranks a public source when they conflict — show the conflict.
2. Update the findings file. Open a notebook only when a claim is settled by running code (see Artifacts).
3. Curate the chat (see Chat). Ask the whole remaining frontier. Wait.

A claim whose answer depends on another claim still open in this round belongs to a later round.

Round format

Skip the preamble. Use the smallest visual that makes the point, with brief prose beside it: Mermaid, trees, or one HTML file. Point at file anchors; do not paste the findings file.

Data-shaped views are in scope when they are the smallest view: a 2-axis sketch, a tiny comparison table, a Mermaid of competing explanations, a sparkline-in-text, an HTML annotated chart. Decoration is not.

Each frontier item:

❓ **C1** - **<claim title>**: <one-line claim / operationalization>

**A.** …
**B.** …
**C.** bounded unknown / keep digging

➡️ **B** — <one line why>

One visual may sit above the letters when the options are easier to see than to read. Letter C (or the last letter) stays available as bounded unknown. If only one reading is honest, that reading is still an option, and the ➡️ still names it.

Evidence

A claim stays open until the findings file records all of:

• the claim in one sentence
• the operationalization
• method (search, fetch, query, code)
• sources or cells, with enough quote or output to check the claim
• what was not searched or run
• uncertainty / failure modes of the method
• verdict: settled / bounded-unknown / needs you

Artifacts

Put files where the repo already keeps notes; if there is none, use findings/ and say the path.

• findings/<slug>.md — canonical claim log for the session. One file; append rounds. Resume by reloading it.
• findings/<slug>.ipynb — at most one per session, created on the first computational claim. Jupyter, Python 3, pandas-class tabular work, unless the repo is clearly another data stack. No notebook when nothing needs to run.
• view-{description}.html — a round's view when Mermaid is not enough. Disposable. Do not HTML-wrap a plot the notebook already shows unless the plot needs a curated frame.

Chat is the round protocol. Files are the evidence locker.

Done

The frontier is empty: every in-scope claim is settled or explicitly bounded-unknown, each with documentary evidence. Stop. Wait for the user to confirm the shared reading. Do not start a design interview off the findings.