Discovery question form

Discovery question form

When the user's brief is ambiguous, the agent's first turn must surface the smallest possible set of clarifying questions that unblock the rest of the workflow. The questions are rendered as a <question-form> artifact inline in the originating assistant message. This is assistant text parsed by the host, not a plugin GenUI surface or a native tool call. Submitted answers return as the next user message, beginning with [form answers — <form-id>].

When to fire

• Brief is missing audience, target medium, or core intent.
• Brief explicitly invites questions ("ask me anything if unclear").
• The discovery skill or pipeline declares a discovery stage.

Emission shape

Emit the form as a question-form block whose body is a JSON object with a top-level questions array. Do not emit a bare question object by itself; the renderer only recognizes the wrapped form contract.

<question-form id="discovery" title="Quick brief — 30 seconds">
{
  "description": "I'll lock these in before building. Skip what doesn't apply — I'll fill defaults.",
  "questions": [
    {
      "id": "audience",
      "label": "Who's the primary audience?",
      "type": "checkbox",
      "options": ["VC", "Customer", "Internal team"],
      "maxSelections": 2,
      "required": true
    }
  ]
}
</question-form>

Question object shape

Each entry in the top-level questions array uses:

• id: stable answer key, for example audience.
• label: user-facing question copy.
• type: one of radio, checkbox, select, text, textarea, number, range, date, time, datetime-local, color, url, email, tel, file, switch, or direction-cards.
• options: required for choice controls; strings are allowed, or objects with localized label and stable value.
• allowCustom: leave unset or set to true for finite-choice controls so users can type their own answer instead of accepting only generated options. Set allowCustom: false only when the downstream system needs an exact machine id.
• customLabel / customPlaceholder: optional localized copy for that custom answer input.
• maxSelections: include this for checkbox controls with a limited selection count.
• required: set to true only when the answer is needed before work can continue.

Convergence

The discovery atom completes when the next user message contains an answer for every required question. Treat those submitted answers as conversation context and do not ask the same questions again unless later input invalidates an answer.