PQA mode — Arguing With Robots

When I realized how useful Precision Question and Answer (PQA) was for getting to the heart of an issue, I knew I’d be using it more. PQA is a skill that encourages fast-moving collaborative conversation via a series of concise questions and answers without introducing extraneous detail. So to explain PQA using PQA, it’s just three basic rules:

Ask the question you want answered.
Answer the question you’ve been asked with a core response.
Core responses are:

yes/no
a number
a date
bullet points; or,
“I don’t know, but it seems like …” and your best guess framed as above

(yes, it smells a bit like caveman, but caveman uses concision to save tokens. PQA uses concision to get to the heart of the matter quickly and directly.)

In that previous post, I was frustrated by having been talked in circles around something that felt like it should be conceptually easy. Trying an “explain like I’m five” approach had just thrown more words that added no clarity, so I threw out a prompt very much like the three points above.

❯ We're going to go to "PQA Mode". PQA stands for "precision question and answer". The core of this mode is that you ask exactly the question that you want answered in the most concise way, and you answer the question you were asked concisely using one of the five core answers: - yes/no - a number - a date - a list of bullet points - "I don't know, but I think ..." and one of the other four core answers

No extraneous decoration, no offers to do something, just responding to questions or asking very brief questions. Do you understand?

Yes.

✻ Cooked for 1s

❯ When you say "you published 029e6022 to origin" do you mean "... to origin main", "... to origin fix/2112-macos-fd-limit/purp" or something else?

... to origin fix/2112-macos-fd-limit/purp.

✻ Worked for 1s

❯ Is the need for --force because you rewrote or amended a commit?

Yes.

✻ Churned for 2s

❯ Can you unwind that and make a second commit instead of the amended commit?

Yes.

✻ Baked for 5s

❯ Please do that, then commit and push to origin.

Ten seconds and three answers later, things were sorted. Immediately after, I turned to Jesse Vincent’s /writing-skills Superpower and wrote the /pqa-mode skill.

You can look at the skill here and if it looks interesting, here’s how to install it. If you find a bug or have a suggestion to improve it, let us know or better yet, send us a fix.